Mobile technologies in healthcare

For the third year, the Bioengineering Group of the Research Center E. Piaggio (University of Pisa), FabLab Pisa and the ABEC consortium have organized an intensive course in Biomedical Engineering: this time focused on applications of Mobile technologies in healthcare.

The one week course will be held during the Innovators Summer School, sponsored by UNECA, at Addis Ababa University in Addis Ababa in Ethiopia, from 11th to 15th January.
The Summer School, in its fourth edition, is dedicated to new students in Biomedical Engineering from the 10 African Universities (7 countries involved, Ethiopia, Tanzania, Uganda, Malawi, Zambia, Kenya and Egypt) of ABEC.

“The philosophy underpinning this and all the previous Summer Schools, is that the Open Source design of biomedical devices and capacity building are the foundations for improving African healthcare” says Arti Ahluwalia the coordinator of the team made up of Carmelo De Maria (also the President of FabLab Pisa), Salvatore Balestrino, Lica Di Piero, Sonia Albana, Pasquale Martucci e Renata Bertocchi. “In this context, the topic of the next Summer School will be to exploit the potential of smartphones (connectivity, visualization, sensors, storage) for creating new biomedical products or smartfying existing objects of relevance to healthcare”.
Thanks to the collaboration of local experts from Afmobi, students will learn how to create new biomedical- relevant apps for Androids. At the end of the Summer School they will be able to to connect smartphones to external bio-sensors using electronic rapid prototyping supported by Arduino and Viper, an idea stemming from FabLab Pisa.

As always, students present their own projects on the theme of “Innovation in Healthcare, focus on Maternal Health and Infectious Diseases”. Through team work and the lessons learnt during the Summer School the projects will be built upon and improved . The University of Pisa will be represented by Licia Di Pietro, from the MSc. in Biomedical Engineering. Thanks to an Erasmus training fellowship, Lica will also spend 4 weeks at Kyambogo University (Kampala, Uganda) training technicians together with hospital engineers from the UK based charity Amalthea Trust.