Amidst all the drug-centric conferences which make up the majority of the opportunities to share knowledge and experience with competitors and clients, it’s always encouraging to find an equal level of enthusiasm for the industry at the smaller, niche conferences.
On Tuesday 29th November I attended Medelec, the only event of its type in the UK and certainly matching the description of a ‘niche’ conference. It’s no secret that the Medical Device and Systems market is growing rapidly, and personal experience has recently shown a clear increase in interest from clients in using electronics to add value or utility to a product. In its first year, Medelec has made a credible stab at addressing this sizeable opportunity.
First, the downside. Inevitably, when a conference deliberately strips itself of the comfort of big-pharma, there’s a practical limit to the size of the event. In this case, 120 delegates took the event close to the limit.
And the upside? By choosing the Menzies Hotel just North of Cambridge (UK) as the venue, UMR (the organisers) have cleverly limited their exposure whilst at the same time attracting a reputable speakers list and an interested audience. It was certainly encouraging to find a full house from the first presentation through until the late afternoon, and there was even the luxury of two parallel presentation tracks during the core hours from 11am.
The presentations ranged from the instructional – Julian Day from Green Hills Software on mitigating risks with IEC62304 (No really, this is interesting stuff, just pop me an email if you don’t believe me) – to the inspirational; Dr Jon Hayes’s presentation on getting a fertility monitor on the market with minimal time or money, for Cambridge Temperature Concepts.
In between these extremes were solid technical presentations from Bitwise, Adacore, Intel, MLelectronics and Wind River (although the parallel track meant I was only able to catch up on the first and last of these by networking over lunch), and a small but interesting exhibition hall featuring stands from these same speakers and a small band of related software tool vendors.
Yes, the rooms were slightly small, and the sound system struggled at times to overcome the overworked air conditioning, but overall this was a productive day and a creditable first attempt to approach the industry from a different angle. It will be interesting to see how the event develops in future years.
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