Rapid rate of technological advances

Feb 25 2010 by Iain Laing, The Journal

GOING through some old newspapers at the weekend I came across an ad from 2001. It was from a discount retailer and in loud red letters told of a laptop going for the bargain price of just £1,200!

As a basic laptop with less than impressive memory capacity I was struck by how expensive, not how cheap it was.

Over the years not only has technology become faster, smarter, and very often smaller, but it has also become a lot cheaper and more readily accessible to the average person in the street.

Not so many years ago much technology was the preserve of the rich and something like a laptop or a mobile phone was a major purchase.

And yet now technology has become so integral to our lives that more and more often we are turning to it to help us solve daily challenges.

One amazing story I heard recently came out of the devastation and horror of the Haiti earthquake. American filmmaker Dan Woolley was trapped when his hotel in Port-au-Prince collapsed. Using a medical app he had downloaded to his iPhone, Mr Woolley treated his injuries, setting his alarm to go off every 20 minutes to stop him going into shock and even using the phone’s camera to map his surroundings and help him find a safer place to await rescue.

Thankfully this is not an everyday story but it proves in the most extreme way, the versatility of the technology available to all of us.

What is more, technology used to be largely used in specialist fields with little crossover into other sectors. Nowadays the technology developed for one sector could soon be used for a whole range of applications.

Take sat-nav technology which was developed by the US Air Force and is now ubiquitous among the general public.

The Centre for Advanced Instrumentation (CfAI) based at the North East Technology Park (NETPark) in Sedgefield has done work that is a classic example of this crossover.

With an international reputation for its development of astronomy instrumentation, many of the tech- niques used have spin-off applications.

The technique of adaptive optics for example, developed for use in telescopes, is assisting in studies of the human eye and helping early diagnosis and treatment of diseases such as diabetes.

So the technological advances being made at the cutting edge of the science and technology sector today could soon filter down into our daily lives and help us in ways we can’t even imagine.

Stewart Watkins is managing director of the County Durham Development Company