The bioelectrical century: bioelectrical engineering and the “inside story” of the electrical century

Almost every aspect of our lives has been affected by new pharmaceuticals, new surgical techniques, new imaging techniques, and new understandings of disease. The story of the transformation of our view of our inside selves, and its consequences, is well known to the general public. What is perhaps less well known is the role of electrical engineering in this unprecedented revolution, and the authors reveal some of this “inside story”. As in almost every field of human technological endeavor, the application of electrical engineering to medicine in the twentieth century was profoundly affected by the development of electronics, its stepchild the computer, and related mathematical advances. Biomedical engineers have been involved in the invention of instrumentation, the development of sensory aids, prostheses, and other therapeutic devices, and the applications of physics and systems theory to physiological systems, including the use of mathematical models. There are three areas of biomedical engineering, however, that uniquely involve the transmission and/or reception of electromagnetic radiation into or out of the human body itself in order to diagnose and/or treat illness-pure “electromagnetic engineering”. It is on these areas, therefore, that the authors focus in telling the story of the “bioelectrical century”. We refer to electrophysiology, electrotherapy, and imaging