The anesthesia workstation of the future.

This team's concern is that technology is not the primary limitation to developing the anesthesia workstation to its full potential. In some ways, medical equipment lags far behind other industries in technological sophistication, standardization, miniaturization, and human factors engineering. Real obstacles appear to be economic and conceptual. The anesthetic process has not been reduced to a series of rigorously derived equations; what the user does is still poorly understood. Manufacturers whose design engineers do not spend a significant part of their work week in the operating room seem to be so ignorant of the real needs of the clinician that their products are doomed to fail or to be mediocre. Clinicians need to encourage their industrial counterparts in the development process to become partners in developing the anesthesia systems of the future. Progress can only be made by having clinicians and developers spend time with one another. Can this inconvenient and frustrating process possibly be worse than the everyday torment caused by manufacturers building what the clinicians do not need, because the clinicians cannot tell them?