Why Engineering Students Should Consider Hacking Healthcare
Humanity is slowly headed toward a global healthcare crisis.
Modern medical and scientific advances have helped us all live longer, but population growth puts us all in a bit of a bind. The United Nations predicts that the world's population will reach 9.6 billion by 2050, at which point the number of people over 60 will double.
For many of the world's top academic institutions, the answer is to hack our way out of it. PCMag attended the recent Health++ hackathon at Stanford University's School of Engineering to check out the latest medtech innovations aimed at lessening that healthcare load.
Health hackathons are an increasingly popular way for students to mingle with the medical community, but also venture capitalists and entrepreneurs. In Stanford's case, this means networking with Silicon Valley technologists looking to license good ideas and take them global, hopefully arming nations with the etools to solve the healthcare problems of tomorrow.