The WHO has published two key documents to improve healthcare in low-resource settings: "Medical Device Donations: Considerations for Solicitation and Provision" and the WHO Compendium of Innovative Health Technologies. These publications, developed with contributions from Davide Piaggio and Leandro Pecchia of the ABSPIE Lab, among others, focus on frugal and sustainable biomedical engineering. They underscore the importance of safety, quality, and regulatory compliance in medical device donations and highlight innovative health technologies. This work reflects the strong collaboration between the ABSPIE Lab and WHO in advancing global health.

The World Health Organization (WHO) has mentioned the paper "The use of Smart Environments and Robots for Infection Prevention Control: a systematic literature review" by Piaggio et al. (2023) in its latest Global Research and Innovation for Health Emergencies report. The report, which was released on October 10, 2023, highlights the most important and promising research and innovation on infection prevention and control (IPC).

IFMBE award presented to the WHO's Adriana Velazquez Berumen

Since 2020, our lab has been supporting the work that the Global Community of biomedical and clinical engineers is doing with United Nations in order to face this pandemic. In the framework of his collaboration as Innovation Manager for the PPE Pillar of the WHO Blueprint and COVID-19 initiative, our lab Director, Prof Leandro Pecchia, contributed to the writing of the ‘Rethinking PPE’ report. This was a collaborative effort of over 50 individuals from different global organisations active in the health sector, including the WHO, UNICEF, The World Bank, The Global Fund, US CDC, and top universities including the MIT, Johns Hopkins, UCL, University of Colorado, University of Warwick. The effort was coordinated by McKinsey & Company .

The main conclusion of the report is that transforming the PPE ecosystem will require five coordinated shifts:

1. Catalysing PPE innovation:
2. Improving standards and quality
3. Expanding and diversifying manufacturing capacity:
4. Strengthening procurement practices;
5. Improving usage and disposal.

"Until the arrival of the pandemic, the importance of PPE seemed to be unknown to most, and above all absent from the research and innovation priorities of all the main research councils.", Prof Pecchia says. "The only ones who have stubbornly worked on PPE since the recent Ebola outbreaks have been the stubborn members of the WHO, in particular Adriana Velazquez Berumen, and the Emergency and Infection Control and Prevention Units, headed by Benedetta Allegranzi and April Baller. Perhaps it is no coincidence that this vision came from three extraordinary women".
Warwick main contribution to this report was probably in the analysis of the inadequacy of PPE regulatory frameworks in time of crisis and in resource-limited setting scenarios (Pecchia et al, 2020).

Here the report: TRANSFORMING THE MEDICAL PPE ECOSYSTEM

The Applied Biomedical Signal Processing Intelligent eHealth (ABSPIE) Lab has been deeply dealing with COVID-19 since the first few cases in the UK.

Led by Dr Pecchia, the ABSPIE Lab multidisciplinary Team has been involved in several activities, briefly described below, giving a significant contribution to tackle the COVID-19 pandemic.