Wired News: Smaller Is Better on Battlefield

Medical equipment is becoming smaller, and more powerful. Our surgical centers are being brought to the patient out in the battlefields. Blood-testing is being crammed into tiny devices with multiple tests done to each drop of blood, ultrasound, oxygen concentrators, and ventilators are being compressed.

The equipment is "reduced in size and weight enough that a handful of people can carry it all inside a few Humvees, set it all up within an hour and have all the equipment for (the) first two operations inside of five backpacks," said surgeon Dr. Atul Gawande, a Harvard School of Public Health assistant professor and journalist who wrote about the state of military medicine in the Dec. 9 issue of the New England Journal of Medicine.

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Wired News: Smaller Is Better on Battlefield