Southern Asia Region’s Global Engineering Debate 2017

The IMechE Southern Asia Region’s Global Engineering Debate 2017 took place at the Turyaa Hotel in Chennai on 1 December 2017. IMechE members, IMechE South India panel members and mechanical engineers from Wood took part.

The event began with a welcome address by Mr. Ravikumar Manuel IEng FIMechE,  Project Engineering Manager, Wood.  Mr. Anshul Verma introduced the debate topic, the panel speakers and acted as a moderator for the event.

The debate began with an introduction, for the audience, to the format of the debate, by chairperson N. Srinivasan. The debate startyed with initial voting by the audience on the four sub-topics, followed by presentations on each sub-topic by the speakers. The topic of debate was “ Healthcare engineering for an ageing population”. The four areas explored in this debate were:

• Life at home - Mr. GSN Murthy
• Transportation - Dr. B.S Santosh Kanna
• Healthcare providers  - Dr. Deepa
• Community providers - Mr. Nitish Chauhan.

Of the four speakers, two were experts from the healthcare sector, one from an academic background and the fourth an IMechE Fellow representing the engineering community.

The audience initially placed most importance on healthcare providers with 50% of the votes, followed by transportation (25%), community provider (15%) and life at home with 10% votes.

After the debate, another vote was conducted and the voting results announced comparing pre-debate and post-debate polls. According to the audience opinion, the domain of healthcare providers is the area where technology can better support the independent life of ageing population.

When the audiences were polled at the end of the debate on the same question as the beginning, the overall winner was healthcare providers (65%), followed by transport (25%), life at home (10%) and community providers (0%). Healthcare providers having gone from 50% of the votes before the debate to 65% of the votes at the end of the debate illustrated a clear change in outlook of the audience. Dr. Deepa had successfully debated the importance of healthcare providers for upgrading lifestyle of the ageing population.

The keynote address was given by Dr. Himangshu Das, Director of National Institute for Empowerment of Persons with Multiple Disabilities (NIEPMD). His speech elaborated on the current trends in the healthcare industry of India, the challenges and the benefits of collaborating with the engineering community to improve the quality of life of the elderly population. His speech was very impressive and received great feedback from all the attendees.