News: ABSPIE recent initiatives
Dr Pecchia invited talk at Africa Health
Dr Pecchia has been invited to give a talk titled "HTA of medical devices: Challenges in design and adoption" at the Health Technology Assessment workshop during the Africa Health in Johannesburgh, Suth Africa, organized by Dr Mladen Poluta as collaboration between SAHTAS and IFMBE.
The University of Warwick helps the European Parliament in defining the forthcoming Agenda on Biomedical Engineering (BME)
Last Tuesday 31st of May the first European Parliament Interest Group on Biomedical Engineering (EPIG on BME)” was launched in the Euro Parliament. This was the result of a long collaboration between the European Alliance of Medical and Biological Engineering (EAMBES), the International Federation for Medical and Biological Engineering (IFMBE) and 3 MPs, Ms Lara Comi (EPP, Italy), Mr Nicola Caputo (S&D, Italy) and Jens Gieseke (EPP, Germany).
Photo: after the EPIG on BME Launch (from left: prof Nicolas Pallikarakis, IFMBE HTAD past-Chair, Prof Richard A Black, University of Strathclyde and Editor-in-Chief of Medical Engineering & Physics IPEM Journal, John Brennan, Medtech Europe Director Regulations & Industrial Policy, Dario Pirovano Medtech Europe Senior Regulatory Adviser, prof Birgit Glasmacher, EAMBES Past President, prof Heinrich Schima, EAMBES Fellow Chair, MP Nicola Caputo, European Parliament S&D, prof Jary Hyttinen, EAMBES president, dr Leandro Pecchia, IFMBE HTAD Chairman and PAWG EAMBES Chairman, prof Shankar Krishnan, IFMBE Elected President, prof Jos Vander Sloten University of Leuven –Belgium, prof Marc Nyssen, IFMBE Treasurer, Adriana Velazquez, Director WHO Medical Device Unit, dr Andrel Linnenbank, EMABES General Secretary, prof Ratko Majarevich, IFMBE Past President.
Parliamentary question: Absence of biomedical engineering from Horizon 2020
Why, differently from the USA, the European Horizon 2020 does not have a dedicated space for BME? Do we want to lag behind USA and Japan in inventing the future of medicine?
With this question in mind, MPs Lara Comi (EPP) and Nicola Caputo (S&D) tabled a Parliamentary question written in collaboration with Dr Leandro Pecchia (EAMBES, IFMBE) asking to the European Commission why, and what they intend to do at this regard.
LAUNCH OF EP INTEREST GROUP ON BIOMEDICAL ENGINEERING
The 31st of May there will be the launch of the European Parliament Interest Group on Biomedical Engineering. This event will see the participation of Professor Jari Hyttinen, President of EAMBES, Dr. Edgardo Maria Iozia, Rapporteur of EESC report on biomedical engineering, Dr. Adriana Velazquez, Senior Advisor and Focal Point of Medical Devices at World Health Organization, Dr Leandro Pecchia, IFMBE HTA Division Chairman, Mr. Andrzej Rys, Director Health systems, medical products and innovation DG SANTE.
IEEE JBHI paper "Fall prediction in hypertensive patients via short-term HRV Analysis"
The first paper proving an association between depressed HRV and risk of falling was published on IEEE Journal of Biomedical and Health Informatics in March 2016.
Enrolling 150 subjects, we trained and tested an automatic classifier basing on Multinomial Naïve Bayes enabled to predict first-time fallers. This achieved sensitivity, specificity and accuracy rates of 72%, 61%, 68% respectively.
This was the first sutdy proving this association.