Japanese Society Activities Update - Immediate Past-President becomes President!

This title is neither a typographical nor a logical error! Professor Fumihiko Kajiya, immediate Past-President of the IFMBE was elected President of the Japan Society of Medical Electronics and Biological Engineering (JSMEBE) in April this year. The officers for the term of April, 1998 through to March, 2000 are:

The Administrative Council consists of 15 members (Table 1), and half of them change annually. Now the Society has 3957 members and 236 associate (student) members of whom the majority are involved in activities related to research and development programs within universities, national institutes and industries, and regretfully a minority are engaged in clinical engineering. The society has 38 companies as affiliated members, and 55 organisations subscribe to a society journal.

Table 1 Administrative Council Members

We have four journals:

1. Japanese Journal of Medical Electronics and Biological Engineering (original scientific papers, in Japanese, four issues a year)
2. Digests of the Annual and Fall Conferences (in Japanese, two issues annually)
3. BME (specific topics in Japanese, four issues annually)
4. Frontiers of Medical and Biological Engineering (English journal of JSMEBE, four issues a year).

There are eight regional branches under the umbrella of the society (Table 2). Every branch arranges small scale conferences, symposia and scientific meetings to actively propagate and promote biomedical engineering in their regions.

Table 2 Branch and chairperson

The 1998 Annual Conference (the 37th) of JSMEBE was held on 14-16 May in Kurashiki, Okayama. A report of the conference appeared in the September issue of IFMBE News.

In addition, we held the Third World Congress of Biomechanics (WCB'98) this year, in Sapporo on 2-8 August. The Autumn Conference will be held in Niigata on 6-7 November with Professor Masahiko Okada as the chair of the organising committee. The next Annual Conference (38th), chaired by Professor Nozomu Hoshimiya, will take place in Sendai on 21-23 April 1999.

This year the society has set up 17 research groups (Table 3), in which researchers in a particular field and topic may get together regularly to discuss their mutual interests. Usually each group organises six meetings a year in various cities, and each seminar has four to six talks and fifteen to fifty participants. These research group activities take the key role of maintaining the scientific potential of the society.

Table 3 Research group activity

The Japanese society has really flourished over the last decade. The membership has been stable or slightly decreasing. The society is looking into why a successful expansion in biomedical engineering in Japan has not led to a corresponding increase in membership, and why there are not more clinical engineers among the members. In Japan, clinical engineers who receive a national license by the Ministry of Health and Welfare after their graduation from the training school and success of the national examination go directly to work in the clinical arena. We are also looking into how we can have new memberships of the researchers who are working at the surrounding biomedical related fields.

Makoto Kikuchi

National Secretary & Chairperson of the International Committee of JSMEBE

Email: mkikuchi@ndmc.ac.jp

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