GEAR: “Venturing into Future Health Technologies”

Venturing into future health technologies is the focused thematic of the Gear consortium Tech4Health comprises team members of two departments: departments of Electronics and Informatics (ETRO) and Industrial Engineering (INDI) of the faculty of Engineering Sciences. Multi-disciplinary technological evolution in this sector is key on a world-wide level: 1) to keep the cost impact of healthcare manageable in the “Western” world due to an increasing ageing population and an increasing population suffering from “modern” diseases; 2) to give access to basic medical care in countries in medium and low resource settings, with intrinsic strong economic growth perspectives as one of the important Sustainable Development Goals of the United Nations. The different valorization strategies start from the vision to make societal sense of audio, video, hyper dimensional signals and sensors for various sectors and to deliver unique value through the multi-disciplinary engineering approach. The vertical technology platform is based on longstanding expertise on data acquisition and embedded sensor systems, wireless sensor networks, data science including Artificial Intelligence and Big data techniques, and data visualization including augmented and virtual reality. The valorization strategy is developed from three points of view: from a patient-centric point of view to fulfill the needs for novel and improved medical devices and equipment, from a hospital centric point of view to fulfill the needs for novel hospital equipment and infrastructure and finally improvement of the daily well-being in modern environments from the society point of view. Spill-over of the technological developments towards smart industry drives finally the development of the last valorization track.