Physicians and medical engineers from around the world gathered in Seoul, supporting ethical medical technologies in the draft of “Seoul Declaration” for the first time in the world.
The Society for Medical Innovation and Technology (SMIT) and the Korea Society of Medical and Biological Engineering held “SMIT2018-IBEC2018 Joint Conference” at Grand Walkerhill Hotel, Seoul, on Saturday. After the conference, the participants announced the “Seoul Declaration: A Manifesto for Ethical Medical Technology.”
Every year, the medical and biological engineers’ group holds the International Biomedical Engineering Conference (IBEC). This year, they ran the program with SMIT’s 30th academic conference from Thursday to Saturday.
The Seoul Declaration reflected the conference’s theme, “medical technology for human values.”
“The latest advances in medical technology are raising many questions relative to ethics. The revolutionary inventions and advancements in the field of medicine have sometimes meant that traditional medical ethics could not be followed,” medical professionals and engineers said in the Seoul Declaration. They recognized that “automated robotics, artificial intelligence, autonomous devices represent an ongoing opportunity to expand and support ethical technical innovation.”
The participants also pledged to support ethical medical technologies to improve patient safety using new medical technologies, while contributing to achieving universal health coverage (UHC) and the United Nations’ sustainable development goals (SDG).
The Seoul Declaration also supported “collaborative, ethical and transparent biomedical design methodologies working with industry for global health concerns.”
The draft urged governments to fund and support the development of new technical standards and “open-access e-infrastructures.”
SMIT said it planned to establish a committee of medical device developers to make the final draft of the Seoul Declaration and seek the support from international societies. It also plans to publish the final draft on an international journal.
“It is meaningful that developers can share the direction and mindset when they develop medical devices,” Kim Young-woo, co-president of SMIT2018-IBEC2018, told Korea Biomedical Review. “This declaration will become a guideline for medical device development.”