Collecting and displaying healthcare ICT — are medical museums ready for the future?

Here are some topics that medical museums need to get involved with if we want to engage with contemporary healthcare:
* Ambient Assisted Living for Elderly Care
* Ambient Intelligence and Intelligent Service Systems
* Analysis and Evaluation of Healthcare Systems
* Clinical Data and Knowledge Management
* Cloud Computing for Healthcare
* Collaboration Technologies for Healthcare
* Context-aware Applications for Patient Monitoring and Care
* Data mining Techniques and Data Warehouses in Healthcare
* Data Visualization
* Decision Support Systems in Healthcare
* Drug Information Systems
* Design and Development Methodologies for Healthcare Systems
* Diagnostic and Therapeutic Technologies in Healthcare
* Digital Hospitals
* E-health & m-health
* Electronic Health Records (EHR) & Personal Health Records (PHR)
* Evidence Based Medicine (EBM)
* Healthgrids
* Health Portals
* Information and Knowledge Processing in Healthcare Environments
* Middleware Support for Smart Homes and Intelligent Applications
* Privacy, Confidentiality and Security Issues in Healthcare Systems
* Related Real World Experimentations and Case Studies in Healthcare
* RFID Solutions for Healthcare
* Smart Homes and Home Care Intelligent Environments
* Telemedicine and Health Telematics
* Ubiquitous and Pervasive Computing in Healthcare
* Usability & Socio Technical studies
* User Interface Design for Healthcare Applications
* Virtual and Augmented Reality in Healthcare
* Virtual Environments for Healthcare
Daunting, right? Or exciting — depending on the museum’s ambitions.
Why do medical museums need to get involved? The list of topics is copied from the call for papers for the 3rd International Conference on Current and Future Trends of Information and Communication Technologies in Healthcare, a meeting series that brings together “multi-disciplinary researchers, professionals and practitioners from both academia and industry”, who are engaged in different facets of healthcare and information and communication technologies (ICTs).
The list contains some of the most important developments and future trends of ICT in healthcare, medical research, public health and pharma. This is a significant part of the future of technoscience-driven medicine and health care.
And therefore it is a momentous challenge for medical museums. These are among the things museums need to collect, curate, exhibit and engage their public with if they don’t want to be reduced to insignificant repositories of the far past.
The next question is whether museums are intellectually prepared to deal with such future trends of healthcare and medical science. Will our traditional humanistic skills be sufficient? Is it enough to hire ICT specialists as curators? Or do we also need to rethink the way we do humanities research? I’ll get back these questions in a later post.
(featured image from here)