The 16^th Mediterranean Conference on Medical and Biological Engineering and Computing (MEDICON) and the 5^th International Conference on Medical and Biological Engineering (CMBEBIH) were held from September, 14 until 16, 2023, in Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina. The conference was supported and endorsed by IFMBELink opens in a new window (Prof Leandro Pecchia is Secretary General) and EAMBES (Prof Leandro Pecchia is Past President) and the ABSPIE lab represented the School of Engineering of the University of Warwick in this international gathering and had a great participation. The event, which was attended by delegates from all over the world, focused on the importance of biomedical engineering and healthcare technology in addressing various healthcare and global challenges and aimed also to enable participants to establish valuable business contacts, exchange ideas and experiences, and develop collaborations in the field of digitalization.

The contributions of the ABSPIE Lab were numerous.

The 16^th Mediterranean Conference on Medical and Biological Engineering and Computing (MEDICON) and the 5^th International Conference on Medical and Biological Engineering (CMBEBIH) were held from September, 14 until 16, 2023, in Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina. The conference was supported and endorsed by IFMBELink opens in a new window (Prof Leandro Pecchia is Secretary General) and EAMBES (Prof Leandro Pecchia is Past President) and the ABSPIE lab represented the School of Engineering of the University of Warwick in this international gathering and had a great participation. The event, which was attended by delegates from all over the world, focused on the importance of biomedical engineering and healthcare technology in addressing various healthcare and global challenges and aimed also to enable participants to establish valuable business contacts, exchange ideas and experiences, and develop collaborations in the field of digitalization.

The contributions of the ABSPIE Lab were numerous.

The 1st edition of the Africa Region Biomedical Engineering and Health Technology ConferenceLink opens in a new window is being held in Nairobi, Kenya, from the 6th to 8th of September of 2023. This was organised by AMEKLink opens in a new window Kenya, supported by the IFMBELink opens in a new window Africa Biomedical Engineering working group, which also has representatives at Warwick (Dr Davide Piaggio), and by the IFMBE (Prof Leandro Pecchia is Secretary General).

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

Declared a pandemic by the World Health Organization (WHO) on 11 March 2020, after the first infections in China at the end of 2019, the Coronavirus disease (COVID-19) has become a global emergency and continued to spread across the world. No country, including Republic of Benin in Africa and Italy in Europe, has been able to escape this disease. Its impact on human health, is disrupting an interconnected world economy through global value chains, given the impact on the entire world population and the economy.

In Benin, from 14th March 2020, the evolution of the Coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic is epidemiologically recorded at 3363 cases confirmed, 95 cases recovered, 46 case dead (January 2021).

Even if the social contexts seem very different, the pandemic creates in healthcare systems of all around the world, a generalized condition of low-resource settings (LRSs), i.e., environments lacking means, specific knowledge, specialized personnel, medical devices, and drugs, and with inappropriate medical locations. In fact, while this condition was already familiar to low- and middle-income countries, COVID-19 has overwhelmingly reported LRS conditions in high-income countries, such as Europe. In addition, the social and ethical impact of the pandemic calls sociology and bioethics to reflect on the perception that the population has of this situation, i.e. the possibility to respect the measures of isolation, the availability of personal protection equipment, the criteria for access to the scarce health resources available.

Warwick Interdisciplinary Research Centre For International Development

Applied Biomedical Signal Processing and Intelligent e-Health Lab

15 March 2021 • 10-11am (UK time)

Alessia Maccaro - University of Warwick

Leandro Pecchia - University of Warwick

Davide Piaggio - University of Warwick

Marius Vignigbé - University of Abomey-Calavi

Roch A. Houngnihin - University of Abomey-Calavi

https://tinyurl.com/wicidcovidbenin