INESC TEC looking after your health

Technology exhibition in the area of Health brings two hundred visitors to INESC TEC

On January 23, INESC TEC presented a total of 34 R&D projects, many developed in partnership with other institutions, in its first Health exhibition: the “Open Day INESC TEC Health 2014”. About two hundred visitors headed to INESC TEC to get to know first-hand the projects made in INESC TEC. Identifying partners interested in exploring the results of research projects, which in some cases requires prototypes and applications to be transformed into commercial products with potential for export, was the main goal of this initiative.

Full house to see INESC TEC’s contribution to Health

About 200 people – including representatives of entities of the Ministry of Health, associations in the sector, companies, universities, R&D institutes, health service providers, students and also members of the INESC TEC community – visited the two INESC TEC auditoriums to get to know the 34 health related projects selected for this exhibition.

An intelligent wheelchair, a surveillance robot, a 3D virtual gym, wearable devices to monitor health conditions, apps to plan and schedule surgeries, technologies to measure the risk of strokes and to prevent depressions, and even software to help diagnose breast cancer, were some of the examples of the research conducted over the last years that the visitors had the opportunity to see.

The results displayed, in different maturing levels (intermediate results, prototypes, demos, and pre-products) address several medical areas, such as cardiology, oncology, ophthalmology, psychiatry, neurology, neurosurgery, nephrology and anaesthesiology, as well as rehabilitation and physical therapy, sports medicine, medical analyses, and other complementary diagnosis and resource management methods. All 34 projects displayed were the result of R&D developed continuously by INESC TEC researchers over the last decade, in partnership with other institutions (see full list of partners below).

The areas covered by the projects were Biomedical Engineering, Information Systems, Robotics, Optoelectronics, Electronic Systems, Telecommunications, Multimedia, Advanced Computing Systems, Artificial Intelligence and Industrial Engineering.

Technology with an impact on society

According to José Correia, the researcher in charge of organising the event, together with Cristina Guimarães, “the goal with this exhibition is to demonstrate that the investment in Portugal in different research areas is not like water in the desert that fades away. Unlike what people may think, the results of R&D developed at INESC TEC are not confined to PhD dissertations or to publishing papers in international journals”. Furthermore, “as an institute that works as an interface between university and industry, over the last 20 years we have been establishing with different entities, particularly with companies, so that we can take to the market the various solutions developed by INESC TEC”, he explained.

With this exhibition, the goal “was to show that research done in institutions like INESC TEC produces results with a practical application, with an impact on society”, José Correia revealed. Moreover, the event was an opportunity to try to “find a set of partners that may be interested in any of these results, not only for almost immediate use, but also to incorporate them in other types of solutions, thus transferring technology to the market”, he added.

Dozens of INESC TEC researchers participated in this event, from several areas of expertise, who presented the different projects to an ‘avalanche’ of guests. Other than an opportunity to identify synergies and to establish future partnerships, this was also a moment to generate new ideas and useful concepts for health service providers, companies in the sector, R&D centres, researchers and decision-makers. By the end of the event, the opinion was unanimous: the initiative should be repeated in the future, not only in the Health area, but in other areas as well.

LIST OF PARTNERS