Today at 9.30 CEST dr Leandro Pecchia will 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 life of patients and healthcare workers.

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

To attend follow the link below:

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

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.

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

12.05.2020, 13-14, Zoom (link below)

Micro-Global Forum sessions on COVID19 set up by WHO (Adriana Velazquez).
We've joined forces with WHO to offer you frequent focused global conversations on key applied topics where the evidence base is shared, reviewed, and applied, particularly to address LMIC emerging needs. The purpose of these micro-forums is to give CEs the management information to pass on to senior stakeholders to showcase what solutions have worked elsewhere.

More information is available on the IFMBE CED website and WHO one.

08.05.2020, 13-14, Zoom (link below)

• Adriana Velazquez, Yin Ling Lin, WHO
• Prof Oluwatoyin Popoolam Head of Department, Biomedical Engineering at University of Lagos
• Moderation: Busola Oronti (Chair), Leandro Pecchia (Co-Chair), Tom Jude (IFMBE CED Chair)

Micro-Global Forum sessions on COVID19 set up by WHO (Adriana Velazquez). We've joined forces with WHO to offer you frequent focused global conversations on key applied topics where the evidence base is shared, reviewed, and applied, particularly to address LMIC emerging needs. The purpose of these micro-forums is to give clinical engineers the management information to pass on to senior stakeholders to showcase what solutions have worked elsewhere.

More information is available on the IFMBE CED website and WHO one.

The main results from the field studies in Sub-Saharan Africa were presented, with a focus on international standards, medical locations and donations of medical devices. No video available, but more information can be found in these articles:

[1] D. Piaggio, D. Medenou, R.C. Houessouvo, L. Pecchia, Donation of Medical Devices in Low-Income Countries: Preliminary Results from Field Studies, in: International Conference on Medical and Biological Engineering, Springer, 2019, pp. 423-427.

[2] L. Di Pietro, D. Piaggio, I. Oronti, A. Maccaro, R.C. Houessouvo, D. Medenou, C. De Maria, L. Pecchia, A. Ahluwalia, A Framework for Assessing Healthcare Facilities in Low-Resource Settings: Field Studies in Benin and Uganda, Journal of Medical and Biological Engineering, (2020) 1-9.