2019 ICPHSO Annual Meeting and Training Symposium

In the new age of the IoT, innovative and nontraditional products are making their way into consumers' hands with increasing regularity.   In fact, IoT products are touching every aspect of our lives, resulting in blurred lines amongst agencies' cross-jurisdictional reach. As a result, agencies must balance desires not to over-regulate with the competing desires to make sure consumers are somehow protected when they engage with non-traditional products. In this session, a panel of senior government regulators will discuss how the government approaches regulating emerging technology products from a risk and regulatory perspective. Additionally, the panelists will explore how they can and do unite to best effectuate a shared mission of protecting consumers and how they are adapting as it becomes easier for consumers to obtain innovative and cross-functioning products.

New digital technologies including IoT, artificial intelligence, autonomous machines and 3D printing are creating new challenges, and raising new questions for innovative manufacturers of products deploying those technologies. Existing standards frequently fall short of providing meaningful parameters, and manufacturers risk falling foul of regulations which may inhibit their ability to continue to innovate and market their products. Likewise, regulators and policy-makers around the world are becoming increasingly concerned about the adequacy of existing regulatory structures to deal with the new safety challenges of new digital technologies.  They are questioning whether significant reforms are needed but struggling to adapt quickly enough to deal with the tech revolution.
 
As the rate of implementation of these technologies in the consumer products sector continues to gather pace, these challenges, and these questions are not going to go away.  New approaches are needed, and fast.
 
This session will start to discuss how solutions to many of these issues for the consumer products sector may be more readily found if we avoid “tunnel vision” on the topic.  Beyond the consumer products sector, many of the same questions are being considered in other sectors and in other contexts, in some cases with the development of solutions being relatively advanced around the world.  
 
• What can we learn from those other sectors, and those other contexts?  
 
• How can the consumer product safety community benefit from a more “united” outlook with other sectors when it comes to new tech?