The lab has been deeply involved in the Global response to the COVID-19 pandemic, in 4 main areas:

• regulatory framework for PPE and medical devices
• telemedicine for monitoring of COVID19 and to provide continuity of care to chronic patients
• AI for early detection of pneumonia
• Training, sharing of best practices

Supporting the WHO with PPE, medical devices and training/dissemination

Prof. Pecchia is part of an international team of experts helping WHO in identifying essential COVID medical devices and preparing specifications for helping Hospitals/MoH, in particular in LMICs. You can find here the WHO tools online

As treasurer of the IFMBE CED, Prof Pecchia is part of an international team which organised a series of webinars on COVID-19 and medical devices in collaboration with the WHO. The program is available here.

Supporting Manufacturers

The Lab has supported manufacturers who have been willing to convert their productions and move into PPE or Medical Devices. In particular, we have supported a number of manufacturers navigating the regulatory framework, informing their design with relevant harmonized standards and norms.

Telemedicine, AI and IoT

The main focus of our Lab is on Telemedcine, AI and IoT for health, with several projects in these areas. The biggest is the GATEKEEPER project (£20mil, 500,000 patients, 8 European NHSs). Telemedicine is a key instrument to fight COVID-19.

We have supported an Italian company to adapt their platform for COVID. This is now serving 20,000+ self-isolated patients and citizens in Rome Region, which use the platform to monitor their data, and transmit those to their local NHS Trust. Further details are available here.

We have supported the Bangor Hospital (NHS north Wales Trust) in respond to the NHSx call for COVID-19. With this call, the hospital will use an App and a wearable sensor to monitor, at home, cancer patients. This will ensure them the continuity of care, while keeping them at home, minimizing hospital accesses as much as possible.

AI for pneumonia detection via symptoms

We are developing an AI system to detect pneumonia from symptoms. This is not COVID specific because data on COVID are not available yet. We are using a dataset from Bosnia (one of the LMIC I have been working with) learning how to distinguish pneumonia from bronchitis and normal influence, but we believe the work we will produce can be then adapted for COVID if/when data will become available.

COVID and LMICs

The one described above are all Global Challenges. Our activities are directly/indirectly the result of our experiences in previous EPSRC GCRF and IAA funded projects. We were considering these topics for limited resources settings (i.e., telemedicine, AI, minimum requirements, regulatory framework, heath technology assessment…) and to many extends a pandemic crisis create a situation that is, de facto, a limited resource one (not enough beds, not enough devices, not enough experiences staff…)

Here our latest publication on similitude between COVID-19 and LMICs, in regard to the limits of current international regulatory frameworks for PPE. The same probably applies to medical devices. Here is the paper.