On January 9th, 2007, Steve Jobs stood before the MacWorld gathering in San Francisco and announced a new product. As the audience cheered, he introduced the device as a fusion of music , phone, and internet connectivity. Up until that time if you wanted all three you needed three separate devices. The iPhone, as it was called, was a revolutionary technology: it changed how we live and work by providing immediate access to communication and information.
Smart phones are used today in ways that even Jobs couldn’t have imagined, all at the touch of our fingers. We look to our screens to get instant information: we can query our phone to locate a restaurant and get directions to it. We can search for the most obscure product, identify it, and order it in seconds. And we can watch videos on how to put together or operate almost anything we can think of.
Smart phones are fantastic at three general tasks: communicating; searching, identifying and locating; and delivering functional information in a timely and accurate manner. I daresay many of us can imagine life without them.
Surgeons and surgical tec...
