On Tuesday, the 6th of June, Emilia had the chance to participate in Ai & Medtech CEE conference organized by AI w zdrowiu coalition. The conference gathered health sector government representatives, directors and heads of medical facilities, startups, and big names from pharma. The event was the first on such a scale in Central and Eastern Europe conference dedicated to artificial intelligence and innovation in health.
There was quite a lot of emphasis on the need to protect patient data. Dr. Rafał Staszewski from the Medical Research Agency was talking about the Centers for Digital Medicine, which are now being created in Poland, the planned centralization of healthcare data, and how this data will be used for research. The Agency started to have regular calls for funding in Ai applied to medical data, which might be helpful for our team.
Dr. Agnieszka Siennicka and Dr. Agnieszka Matera-Witkiewicz from Wroclaw Medical University talked about the creation of the first accredited biobank in Poland, which received the ISO 9001:2015 certificate and is the lead institution creating norms and processes for this field.
They also presented a project in which Ai specialists were invited to work with healthcare representative from their university. During the project implementation, both sides needed to adjust their expectation regarding what could be done and what was required—a great example of interdisciplinary work.
By far the best presentation was given by Mr Gyorgy Levay, Research Manager at Infinite Biomedical Technologies and Lab Leader at the Széchenyi István University, Hungary. After suffering a devastating meningitis infection, which led to amputations on all four limbs, he dedicated his work to developing upper-limb prosthetics. His presentation was a total eye-opener. He didn’t have slides. He opened his code, ran it, and showed how training and prosthetics work in real life. Just WOW!
During the demonstration, he went through the history of functionalities and difficulties in use of prosthetics and, in the end, asked a member of the audience to train his system. After a few minutes, the person was able to move the prosthetics attached to Mr Levay’s arm. The talk was simply amazing on so many levels. Perseverance and great humor of the speaker, seeing the actual code in action, and understanding the challenges in a more vivid way than from any slides: does Bluetooth always work? How to repeat precisely the same movement over and over again to train the system? How to always do the same resting position when the sensors are inactive and how to do it instinctively? How to show a person that is not a specialist in Ai or engineering what is needed for training and when the movements are done correctly? And what about the idea of someone else using the prosthetic limb or it getting out of hand?
It was a fruitful half-day just a few hundred meters from the Institute.