The Need of Control Concepts in Bio-Medical Engineering

Abstract The usual elements of Bio-Medical Engineering include the areas of simulation and modeling of non-linear physiological systems, health care systems optimization, controlled prostheses for the handicapped, exact control of artificial organs or support systems, and the rapidly developing field of man-machine system interface. To these obviously control oriented areas must be added the less obvious fields of automatic drug therapy, information filtering, processing, and error minimizing, and a host of others. The paper presents not only the present status of control theory applications in these areas, but particularly looks at the practical limiting of progress in these fields without the state-of- the-art control aspects.