• Emergency care systems

The history of the human race is littered with the intermittent arrival of technological innovations that lead to major and irreversible changes in the way our species communicates and interacts.

People movement was improved by the wheel, the precise measurement of longitude improved navigational accuracy at sea, the steam engine led to the locomotive, the combustion engine led to the car and understanding of flight physics and engineering helped conquer the sky. Communication over long distances without the need for human movement resulted from the printing press, the telegraph, the telephone, the wireless and television, the fax machine and in more recent times the digital revolution.

The latter is an astonishing thing; apart from the wonders of the science and technology that drives it, in just a few years it has become so integral to our lives that most of us take it for granted and quickly complain if it temporarily fails; it is hard to remember what our world was like without …