Cardiovascular Health Engineering: from Wearable “MINDS” to Emerging Convergence Technologies
The 2011 report issued by MIT argued that convergence was the third revolution in biomedical research, calling for the integration of physical science, life sciences and engineering for needed revolutionary advances in health. The 2016 white paper on “Convergence: The Future of Health” sets a true strategy for convergence-based research in health. The ever-increasing aging populations and the prevalence of chronic diseases such as heart disease and stroke, the leading cause of global death, are society’s most pressing health challenges. The convergence research model provides a blueprint for addressing these grand challenges and will no doubt lead to future healthcare systems that enable the Participation of all people for the early Prediction and Prevention of diseases such that Preemptive treatment can be delivered to realize Personalized, Precision, Pervasive, and Patient-centralized healthcare, i.e., the paradigm of the 8P’s Medicine. The Convergence will improve the quality of human life worldwide.
This talk will outline some of our research work in cardiovascular health engineering supported by the “973” project which attempts a convergence approach not only to integrate technologies across multiple scales in the biological hierarchy from molecular, cell, organ to system, but also to involve academia, industries and government for the translation. The presentation will focus on the development of unobtrusive wearable ‘MINDS’ technology for cuffless blood pressure estimation and its integration with nano-biomarker detection, medical imaging and machine learning for the early prediction of acute cardiovascular diseases. Using the atherosclerotic plaque assessment as an example, this talk will also attempt to illustrate that the convergence approach should allow the practice of 8- P’s medicine that is predictive, preventive, precise, pervasive, personalized, participatory, preemptive, and patient-centralized.
Biography
Prof. Yuan-Ting Zhang is currently the Chair Professor of Biomedical Engineering at City University of Hong Kong. He was the Sensing System Architect in Health Technology at Apple Inc., California, USA in 2015. He was the founding Director of the Key Lab for Health Informatics of Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) and the founding Director of the CAS-SIAT Institute of Biomedical and Health Engineering. Professor Zhang dedicated his service to the Chinese University of Hong Kong from 1994 to 2015 in the Department of Electronic Engineering,
where he served as the first Head of the Division of Biomedical Engineering and the founding Director of the Joint Research Center for Biomedical Engineering. Prof. Zhang was the Editor-in-Chief for IEEE Transactions on Information Technology in Biomedicine and the founding Editor-in-Chief of IEEE Journal of Biomedical and Health Informatics. He served as Vice Preside of IEEE EMBS, Technical Program Chair of EMBC’98, Conference Chair of EMBC’05, International Committee Chair of EMBC’13, and Technical Program Co-Chair of EMBC’17. Prof. Zhang is currently the Editor-in-Chief for IEEE Reviews in Biomedical Engineering, Chair of 2018 Gordon Research Conference on Advanced Health Informatics, Chair of the Working Group for the development of IEEE 1708 Standard on Wearable Cuff-less Blood Pressure Measuring Devices, and Chair of 2016-2018 IEEE Award Committee in Biomedical Engineering. Prof. Zhang’s research interests include cardiovascular health informatics, unobtrusive sensing and wearable devices, neural muscular modeling and pHealth technologies. He was selected on the 2014, 2015, 2016 and 2017 lists of China’s Most Cited Researchers by Elsevier. He won a number of international awards including IEEE-EMBS best journal paper awards, IEEE-EMBS Outstanding Service Award, IEEE-SA 2014 Emerging Technology Award. Prof. Zhang is elected to be IAMBE Fellow, IEEE Fellow and AIMBE Fellow for his contributions to the development of wearable and m-Health technologies.