The ISBGroup Blog

On May 6, Gunnar Cedersund held the opening keynote presentation at a workshop in Gothenburg. The event was arranged by the Gothenburg Center for Digital Health, and featured lots of interesting presentations during the day. The title of the event was “From idea to patient benefit”, and the various talks dealt with innovative ideas and technologies, utilizing e.g. AI, drones and robots, patient-centered medicine, etc. Gunnar’s opening keynote presentation dealt with, as usual, our digital twins, and outlined how they are developed in order to help transform healthcare into one centered around P4-medicine: personalized, predictive, preventive, and participatory medicine. This will be done by giving all patients access to their own digital twin. This twin is constantly updated, by combining wearable sensors, electronic healthcare records (journal data), and qualitative observations done by the patients themselves. The twin will then be used by the patient himself/herself, as well as by a variety of different actors, such as personal trainers and health coaches, medical doctors, physiotherapists, eldercare personnel, relatives, etc. A first clinical study, to test this idea, will start in the autumn, as part of the big STRATIF-AI project. 

On May 21, we held a new edition of the workshop entitled “BME@LIU day”. This is an annual event, revolving around Biomedical Engineering (BME) at Linköping University (LIU). For the last 4 years, Gunnar Cedersund has been the chair of the program committee, and we are therefore heavily involved in the arrangement of this conference. 

One of the most fun things with this event is that it is growing steadily (see graph above). When Gunnar took over 4 years ago, there were just above 100 participants, and the program consisted of a single track the whole day. Since then, the event has grown in different ways, and we now have multiple parallel sessions, which are co-arranged with various other organizations, and the number of participants has grown to 250. This has also been accompanied with a corresponding growth in the number of students and companies participating in the local arena and poster session throughout the day (see picture below).

This year, we featured two keynote speakers: i) Mikael Forsgren from MathCore, who gave an abridged version of the opening keynote presentation held at the gigantic EASD conference last year, ii) Ralph Maddison, from Australia, who spoke about his SMART home, which features various eHealth solutions and sensors, to aid in a new smart and integrated living situation for heart failure patients. More information about the program and event can be found at the BME Conference website as well as in the news article written by LIU, featuring lots of nice pictures from the event.