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.

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.

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

Martina Andellini was interviewed about this project carried out in Bambino Gesù Children’s Hospital in Rome.

This project aims at developing a rigorous and reliable decision-making support algorithm for active implantable medical devices (AIMDs) in order to evaluate their performances and to finally select the most suitable and patient-specific AIMDs model.

The video of the interview can be found Link to the video.

4th of June, 2020, 12 CEST (11am UK)

The Croatian EU Council Presidency Conference on Better Future of Healthy Ageing 2020 (BFHA 2020) will be held online from June 3rd to 5th due to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic situation.

BFHA2020 is organized by the University of Zagreb School of Medicine in cooperation with the Ministry of Science and Education of the Republic of Croatia, under the auspices of the European Commission as part of the Croatian Presidency of the Council of the European Union.

Dr Pecchia will give a keynote talk titled The Impact of Smart Technologies in the Future of Healthy Ageing.

The Event will be broadcast via web. Info here.

Organized by the Institute of Biomedical Technology (INBIT), and endorsed by Hellenic Society of Biomedical Technology (ELEVIT), Clinical Engineering Division (CED) and Health Technology Assessment Division (HTAD) of IFMBE.

When: May 11, 2020, Zoom

11:30 AM Greece Topic: HTA of Medical Devices webinar Agenda:

11:30 – 12:00 Introduction on HTA of Medical Devices, Prof. Nicolas Pallikarakis

12:00 – 12:45 Different Approaches for HTA Appraisal of Medical Devices, Ass. Prof. Leandro Pecchia

12:45 – 13:00 Q & A

Recording available here.

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.