Prof. Peandro Pecchia has held a seminar on Biomedical Engineering in low-resource settings (LRSs).

The United Nations’ 17 sustainable development goals are based on the principle of “leaving no one behind”. In particular, SDG3 focuses on Health and Wellbeing, striving for equitable healthcare access, worldwide. Notwithstanding, the actual situation is still far from being equitable. Although most of the world’s population is treated in low-income countries, only a small oligarchy of high-income countries rules the medical device market, setting and following de facto standards and minimum requirements, which do not take into consideration the scarcity of resources and the harsh conditions of low-resource settings. This mismatch hinders the safe and efficient functioning of medical devices, jeopardizing the lives of patients and healthcare workers.

This webinar gave an overview of the ABSPIE Lab experience in Africa, with a specific focus on clinical and biomedical engineering, and ethics.

https://www.dima.uniroma1.it/dima/archivionotizie/biomedical-engineering-low-resource-settings-lrss 

IFMBE CED is the global chapter of Clinical Engineers and allied professionals dedicated to the advancement of safe and effective medical technology design, deployment and management programs. IFMBE is an NGO in official relation with the WHO.

IFMEB CED launched a webinar series since the first weeks of the COVID-19 pandemic in collaboration with WHO. The goal was to support the global community of clinical engineers in preparing their hospitals to face the progression of pandemic. The first affected shared with other clinical engineers their local experience, and this helped making hospitals more resilient, and saving tens of life. Please find the full repository of all recordings and presentation material here: IFMBE CED-WHO COVID-19 webinars

These seminars on Women on Clinical Engineering are particular dear to us, because the role of CE woman in this pandemic was not sufficiently highlighted. We know that the pandemic has affected woman workers more than their male peers, but we also know that there are lots of positive stories that we like to share. -

We are proud to highlight Warwick contribution in this initiative, with Dr Kallirroi Stavrianou being the Technical Manager/Secretariat of the IFMBE CED.

March 24: Women in Clinical Engineering/Health Technology (HT) Webinars: Women Shaping the Health Tech World

Register here https://us02web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_UV9P0ToxQl2wYHx9nHxpag

March 25: CED Women in Clinical Engineering/Health Technology (HT) Webinars: Women Addressing Today’s HT Challenges

Register here: https://us02web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_Cc_90BpRQKWcu6G-WZnmNA

Tiba Vent team from Kenyatta University (Nairobi, Kenya) will present a mechanical ventilator named Tiba vent.

This group is the winner of the 2020 UN 🇺🇳 Person of the Year Award

This mechanical ventilator was designed, developed and prototyped during the first wave of COVID-19 when the whole world was entering local lockdowns.

A multidisciplinary team comprising biomedical engineers, medical doctors, software and electronic engineers teamed up to create the first ever made patient ventilator in Kenya.

Tiba vent, currently under clinical ventilation, was designed taking into consideration international standards and standards from the Kenya Bureau of standards, as well as the world health organisation’s guidelines.

This webinar presented the team of students from Kenya, as well as the innovative medical device they prototyped.

Prof Akinwale Coker (University of Ibadan, Nigeria) will discuss about the importance of problem identification and needs assessment phase in healthcare technologies and medical devices design with special focus on low-resource settings, and the approaches through which such can be achieved. He will focus on the process of medical device development should always be aimed at filling certain gaps that were previously detected during a needs assessment. The second part of the talk will be a showcase of several medical devices (e.g., an infant warmer, a needle crusher, an incubator, etc.) that were prototyped in his university in collaboration with some other local and international universities.

Prof Luciano Mirarchi (Biomedical campus of Rome, Italy) is a senior manager at Siemens Health. His talk will show the innovative applications and possibilities related to the use of artificial intelligence in healthcare settings. In particular, cutting-edge applications will be introduced, spanning from automatic contouring of cancer regions in the imaging domain, to smart algorithms for catheter and vessel identification. The final part of the talk will focus on ethical and regulatory aspects concerning the application of artificial intelligence in medicine.

Dr Leandro Pecchia (University of Warwick, UK) will hold the first webinar of the Quadrilateral collaboration among the Vrije University Brussels, the University of Warwick, the University of Patras, and the University of Ljubljana. The talk will present the multidisciplinary team of the Applied Biomedical Signal Processing Intelligent eHealth Lab, focusing on the different streams of research, spanning from medical device design and regulations to health technology assessment and artificial intelligence.

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)

Follow this link:

https://tinyurl.com/wicidcovidbenin

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

In May 2019, the World Health Assembly of the World Health Organisation (WHO) decided to start working on a free international nomenclature of medical devices, including IVDs, for facilitating and harmonising the work of regulators, procurers, supply and user around the globe. According to the WHO, this nomenclature must be a "Public Good", not subject to copyright, freely accessible to everyone, and designed to consider the real need of healthcare professionals (e.g., nurses, clinical engineers), facilitating their daily work. For this reason, the WHO considered aligning the nomenclature with the International Classification of Diseases 11th Revision (ICD11).

The European Union has decide to change its official nomenclature adopting the Italian nomenclature.

Consequently, the Nomenclature Working group of EAMBES (European Alliance for Medical and Biological Engineering & Science) organised a webinar led by international experts aiming at clarifying the Italian Nomenclature system of Medical Devices.

The webinar will be held on February 11th at 3 PM UK Time by Dr. Ernesto Iadanza, Adjunct Professor, Department of Information Engineering - Università degli Studi di Firenze, and Prof. Fabiano Bini, Associate Professor, Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, Universita’ La Sapienza di Roma

5G will be leveraged to realise new opportunities for regional businesses, academic researchers, University staff and students. Warwick is the first University campus that has proactively been given 5G activation by BT.

Learn how this can change our lives.

Hear from expert speakers:

Wendy Coy – Director of Operations, Innovation Group, and Facilitator

David Plumb – Chief Innovation Officer, Innovation Group, University of Warwick

Lucy Baker – Service Technology Director, CTIO, BT Enterprise

Darren Farmer – Business Development Director, BT

Professor Theodoros N. Arvanitis holds the Chair of Digital Health Innovation and he is the Director of The Institute of Digital Healthcare, WMG, at University of Warwick.

Dr Leandro Pecchia – Associate Professor (reader) of Biomedical Engineering. Director of the Applied Biomedical Signal Processing and Intelligent eHealth Lab

Robert Franks – Managing Director of West Midlands 5G Limited

Link to the event

Silvio Pagliara will hold the webinar: How technology and AI can improve the quality of life. Archipelago 2035 – Russian Federation, Multiple Universities

The speech is an overview on the design of the Assistive technology and how the Artificial Intelligence is changing them towards a true empowerment of people with disabilities in everyday life.

Link to the event

(in Russian - use the browser automatic translation tool)