28 Apr 2022
ABCP-TBIS-IDHIMIA Joint Lecture
Under the pressure of COVID19 pandemic and a global trend of ageing population, health systems in many countries are subject to substantial budget pressure to meet the healthcare needs. Reduction of hospital bed days by achieving earlier discharge becomes inevitable to cut down the NHS expenditure. However, without appropriate healthcare, patients are at the risk from isolation, depression, strokes and fractures caused by falls in the home, as well as the post-operative complications, which will result in increasing hospital readmission rates. It has been identified that 80% of face-to-face interactions with the NHS are unnecessary if appropriate technologies could be developed to mitigate these problems.
To address the healthcare grand challenge, there is an urgent need to develop advanced technologies for creating innovative remote home based personalized digital healthcare technologies. This could be achieved by developing advanced techniques to engineer advanced materials (e.g. graphene) into and/or onto textile fibres, which will be interfaced with human body and internet mobile devices and cloud computational modelling and simulation of physiological and biomechanical behaviours of human body, as well as its interactions with clothing and external environment. Thus, smooth real time healthcare monitoring, diagnosis, advice and risk/emergency warnings to patients and their medical doctors could be provided in an invasive and seamless fashion.
To achieve the goals, a scientific theoretical framework needs to be developed to address the key scientific and technical challenges involved, including: (1) Establish scientific understanding and engineering principle to fabricate advanced nano-scale functional materials such as graphene into flexible and strong smart fibres with sensing, energy harvesting, energy storage and/or actualization functions; (2) Develop advanced manufacturing techniques to produce advanced wearable smart textile materials (fabrics) using the smart fibres; (3) Develop science of design and engineering principles of system integration of smart fabrics with micro-electronics to produce smart devices; (4) Derive technical solutions to integrate smart devices with wireless data communication technologies to transfer data to cloud servers; (5) Develop cloud-based database, data analysis techniques, as well as computational modelling and simulation of human biological behaviour, material functional performance and their interactions with external environments to establish digital biological health avatar with AI based diagnosis capability for individuals; (6) Develop technical solutions to provide real-time medical professional diagnosis and feedback to individuals and/or healthcare workers. Careful consideration of the ethics, risks and regulation of such technology is vital from its inception, as the success of this work will challenge both individual patients’ healthcare and wellbeing and the organization of timely medical intervention to save lives and reduce healthcare expenses. In this lecture, the scientific foundation of textile electronic bioengineering and the development international standards are reviewed.
This lecture is jointly organised by the ABCP (Association of British Chinese Professors, 全英华人教授协会), TBIS (Textile Bioengineering and Informatics Society) and IDIHMIA (International Digital Health and Intelligent Materials Alliance).
