What are some of the things that biomedical engineers do to help others?

Helping others is always a wonderful goal to set for a career. Trying to pick a path that enables that goal is not always easy. Everyone has different gifts, and everyone has different needs to see the results of what they do. That being said, as a biomedical engineer, it is sometimes very easy to directly see what it is that you do to help others, if you can see the forest through the trees.
We spend much of our time and our days designing new devices, and documenting how to submit these devices to the FDA for use in the field, and we sometimes can spend multiple years on those projects, and more than one at a time. We often forget that the device is an improvement, over some other device already in existence that will make medical procedures more effective, safer or faster. Sometimes we even get to work on truly groundbreaking devices that allow treatments that were impossible even ten years before.
When you get to see those devices in use, you know you were part of the team that may have added three months of life for a cancer patient so she gets to see her newborn granddaughter. Maybe you even created a new procedure to add years of life. Perhaps you get to know one more grandfather doesn’t have to suffer thrombus when a long term infusion line is in place. (Painful and problematic for many people.)
So at times it is easy to lose sight of it. (Not see the forest through the trees!) It is easy to forget why you work in the field or to even ask yourself if what you are doing is changing anything at all, because the change is incremental. But every few years you get to step back and you realize you make a difference every day, on every project.