Tech Talks Central

Dr. Sayrafian talks about the next big thing in our lives, wearable and implantable sensors, used mainly in mobile health. He explains how we can power them with energy from microharvesters that exploit the natural movement of our body, producing energy proportional to their size, and reveals a user-centric and quite challenging vision for health future: patients and seniors living better at home and away from the hospital, yet better monitored and cared of. Thanks to modern health services that follow them everywhere. Interviewed by Yannis Rizopoulos for Tech Talks Central.

Denmark’s first professor in Welfare Design, Dr. Andrea Corradini, explains the groundbreaking five year collaboration between Kolding School of Design and Lillebaelt Hospital in Denmark. His work to realize the ‘social ‘experiment’ focuses on how calculated applications of design (eg. adjustable lighting at the nurses station) and not across the board spending cuts, actually save money, increase productivity, quality of services, patient care, and efficiency. The professor tells us the project originates from the perception of ‘welfare’ as a predominant social goal in Denmark, in direct contradiction to other western societies. Dr. Corradini mentions successes thus far and future obstacles he anticipates. He highlights ‘human factor’ as the determining element for this project to succeed or fail. He explains the need to develop a feasible approach to facilitate healthcare professionals to shift perspectives and adjust to an alternative, sometimes radical, point of view. Interviewed by Venetia I. Kyritsi for Tech Talks Central.

In this interview we talk with Dr. Benny Lo, Lecturer at the Hamlyn Centre, Imperial College London, about the current research in the field of Body Sensor Networks. The focus is on using small sensors, often in the form of pervasive wearable devices, for continuous monitoring of patients. The research is concerned with the entire end-to-end system from sensor hardware, operating system, analytics all the way to the actual clinical trials. At the second half of the interview we discuss a few of the big trends in healthcare innovation as these are shaped by some of the major and, to some extent, diverse commercial and non-commercial driving forces. Interviewed by George Voulgaris for Tech Talks central.

Dr. Kayyali explains the benefits of CANadvice, an Android mobile application tested in 2014 in UK and used by patients receiving oral chemotherapy at home, in order to alert their doctors about possible quite painful side-effects, while undergoing treatment. She also speaks about Welcome, a European project which is in essence a monitoring system for pulmonary diseased patients, based in the cloud. Interviewed by Yannis Rizopoulos for Tech Talks Central.

Mr. Veinoglou talks about loyalty schemes and gamification – a hot issue in health, as it can be used in many sectors and in different ways; how he motivates organizations and enterprises in Greece, as well as abroad, to use the techniques. As every case has its own needs and requirements, the platform solution (or, rather the framework) proposed by Icon Platforms is a modular one, that may be shaped and transformed in the most suitable way. Interviewed by Yannis Rizopoulos for Tech Talks Central.

Evika Karamagioli starts out with why data should be open and what their value is when combined with public policies. We ask her who will analyse efficiently this data and what the challenges are in collecting this data; who profits from it and what kind of scientists should be responsible to analyse it. She insists on citizen participation and how they should be trained to understand and access the data whether it be their own or society’s in general. She explains what the Ideatopos 2015 conference is about and how its purpose is to link technological excellence with social innovation by creating meaningful services for citizens and opening up a dialogue about citizens, policies and ICT. Interviewed by Vicki Kolovou for Tech Talks Central.

Veteran Program Officer, Dr. Lymberis, explains the many ways European Commission employs to support enterprises and SMEs in particular, that focus on nano- microelectronics and smart systems/apps, used mainly in the healthcare sector. Through new programs that are innovative and greatly adapted to their special needs, niche players may now submit proposals and get support for the design and development of prototypes; responding to competitors and narrowing the gap with USA or Far East countries. Interviewed by Yannis Rizopoulos for Tech Talks Central.

What if you could see what calms you down or increases your stress as you go through your day? What if you could see clearly what is causing these changes for your child or another loved one? Javier Hernandez is currently working towards his Ph.D. at the MIT Media Lab investigating Affective Computing: the field of using sensors and computers in order to interpret feeling and emotion. Starting from the current experiments at MIT Media Lab using off-the-shelf Google Glasses as the human-computer interface, we are talking about the importance of being able to provide immediate/real-time feedback to the user and the repercussions in diagnostic, motivational/gamified experiences. Interviewed by George Voulgaris for Tech Talks central.

Current healthcare practices and technologies are limited what it comes to offering a treatment that is personalized and optimized for the individual patient. The reasons are not only due to current technology limitations of legacy systems but also due to operational practices and economics. Dr. Andreas Triantafyllidis, a PostDoc Research Scientist at the Institute of Biomedical Enginnering at the University of Oxford, talks about the ongoing research in using pervasive systems to achieve better, personalized patient monitoring and treatment. Using pervasive systems, combining remote monitoring, mobile technologies and focusing on optimizing user-interaction and user-experience with the system the aim of the research is to remove barriers and to drive adoption and retention by both patients and health-care professionals. Interviewed by George Voulgaris for Tech Talks central.

Michael Dillhyon, President of Vital Connect Europe, is a professional with an outstanding track record in leading, founding and advising businesses in the fields of life sciences, biosciences, eHealth. We talk about recent advances in health-patches - tiny self-powered adhesive devices that can be placed directly on the patient’s body for non-invasive, continuous, remote monitoring of several vital signs and metrics. In the second part of our discussion we talk about the tidal wave of change on our every-day perception of health, fitness and health - a change powered by the convergence of several disciplines and underlined by what we call Human Analytics. Interviewed by George Voulgaris for Tech Talks central.