Inside Medical Devices

Every medical device has two sides: the face we see and the inside we don’t. On this one’s face, a heartbeat is drawn across the screen, and a small heart blinks with every beat. To see where it all comes from, the cells held up a magnifying glass. Behind the screen, a chip was counting, a coil was making its field, a gear was turning and a battery was keeping it all going, every part doing its own small job for that one heartbeat. Now the cells want to look inside every device, one at a time, starting with the beam.

Patients have check-ups, and so do the devices that look after them. When this one’s turn came, the cells opened it up and made sure every part was in its place. They checked that it was safe to touch, and held it up to a heartbeat they knew by heart, to be sure its screen told the truth. They swapped one tired part for a fresh one, wrote everything down in the device’s logbook, and put a small label on its side with the date of its next check-up. The device didn’t say thank you. But that day its little heart seemed to blink a bit brighter.

In a race, the fastest car only wins if its pit crew is quick and careful. Hospitals have pit crews too, though you rarely see them: the engineers and technicians who look after every device, checking each one on a schedule, long before anything goes wrong. The cells in this picture have joined the crew. Their favorite kind of day is a quiet one: every device checked, nothing broken, and no patient kept waiting.