As you may have figured from our Twitter feed (https://twitter.com/naturemedicine), Nature Medicine has spent the past couple days camped out at the TEDMED meeting in San Diego, California. The annual medical technology conference kicked off on a strong note, when singer Charity Tillemann-Dick serenaded the audience with opera. The performance was moving, but what really left the audience breathless was the fact that she had undergone a double lung transplant a little over a year ago.

Tillemann-Dick’s story set the theme for much of the conference: the pervasive message was that technology can empower patients, but that to really live patients have to actively engage with their treatment. (In Tillemann-Dick’s case ‘really living’ means singing, and ‘engagement’ involved retraining her new set of lungs.)

Inventor Dean Kamen (of Segway electric scooter fame) told a story that illustrates this very concept when he brought out a model boat made of wood. It was a neat enough little boat, something that a might be a child’s toy or belong to a craft enthusiast. What made the boat special, though, was that it was made by an amputee using prosthetic hands. The ‘Luke’ arm that works in conjunction with a device that interfaces with nerve endings so that the user can control it with his mind.

Hugh Herr, the MIT Media Lab innovator whom we profiled in 2007, looked to the future and said that in a decade devices will connect so well with neurons that people wearing prosthetic legs would be able to walk on the beach and feel the sand.

For those who wanted a front-row view on medicine, Emlyn Koster, president and CEO of the Liberty Science Center in New Jersey, brought the healing process to the stage by broadcasting a live heart bypass. To heighten the immediacy of the moment, he conversed with the surgeon during the (calmly progressing) procedure. Koster’s decision to air the surgery at TEDMED was not to mimic an episode of Grey’s Anatomy (which it didn’t) but to demonstrate the type of positive interaction with medicine that students visiting his museum experience when they watch these live surgical broadcasts.

Shaf Keshavjee, meanwhile, put every slide-show presentation at any conference in history to shame when he wheeled a massive organ preservation machine out onto the stage. Keshavjee, a thoracic surgeon and director of the Toronto Lung Transplant Program, is on a quest to make it easier to preserve and prep organs before they are transplanted. Rather than throwing the organ on ice and keeping it there, the machine pulses solution through the donor’s lung, allowing physicians to assess the quality of the organ (and, one day, prep it with gene therapy treatments to aid healing and immune tolerance in the recipient). “It’s not a perfect science yet, but we’re getting there,” Keshavjee told the crowd.

The machine Keshavjee brought (via airplane from Denver) had a set of pig lungs nestled inside of it to demonstrate how it works. But he didn’t want attendees to just see the sustained organ, he wanted them to feel it. When he invited members of the audience to come up and touch the lungs, none other than Martha Stewart raised her hand in hopes of getting called up to stage. Moments later — with gloves donned — the queen of domesticity was fondling the pig lungs with fascination. (Was there a recipe flashing through her mind?)

The variety of talks at TEDMED ranged from designing hand-held ultrasound devices to making pacemakers to one day regulate brain activity in conditions such as obsessive-compulsive disorder. But for this correspondent there was one device we saw that was absolutely unnecessary: When Tillemenn-Dick took the stage on the third day for an encore performance, she came with a microphone in hand, presumably because she was singing jazz this time. But in the end, double lung transplant and all, there was really no need for a mic at all. And that spoke volumes.