In the past decades, we have witnessed the transition from telegraph to home phones and finally to handheld phones. Now, the soaring population aging, the quarantine, and the shortage of medical instrumentations are demanding decentralized medical technologies that can enable remote and personalized healthcare. Wearable technologies are the protagonists. Emerging wearable devices include, but are not limited to, smartwatches, smart clothing, smart glasses, smart jewelry, and wearable cameras. Some of these wearables can already measure vital signals such as heart rates, breathing rates and blood pressure.

Moving forward, next-generation wearables are expected to enable on-demand blood tests and continuous recording of our electrophysiological signals for disease screening and monitoring. However, several challenges remain. Take the Neuralink brain probe as an example, intensive efforts are being dedicated to making these wearable probes 1) as small as possible for comfort uses, 2) as soft as possible to avoid tissue damage, and 3) as sensitive as possible to improve the accuracy.

In this workshop, the speaker will describe how wearable technologies are impacting our healthcare systems, how to develop a wearable device, how we can address the most pressing challenges with transdisciplinary biomedical engineering approaches, and finally, how Biomedical Engineering can ultimately improve the human health.

Date: April 27, 2022 (Wednesday)

Time: 3:30-4:30pm

Speaker: Dr Shiming Zhang, Assistant Professor, Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, The University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong

About the speaker:

Dr Shiming Zhang is currently an Assistant Professor at the Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering (EEE) of the University of Hong Kong (HKU), leading the wearable, intelligent and soft electronics (WISE) research group. Before that, He spent three years at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), as a postdoctoral scholar and obtained his Ph.D. from Ecole Polytechnique, University of Montreal, Canada. He has ten years’ research experience in developing wearable technologies for human-centric and personalized healthcare. Some of these technologies have been commercialized by a startup company. He has authored/co-authored about 50 journal and conference articles in the field of wearables and co-founded the startup company SESIC, which aims to develop wearable medical devices. He has received many awards, including the title of Vanier Canada Scholar by the Government of Canada, and the Chinese Government Award for Outstanding Student Abroad. His research group has received many awards, including the prestigious MRS Best Presentation Award and the IEEE EMB Project Competition Award. He served as Event Committee Chair in IEEE Nano Conference 2021 and frequently served as Symposium Chair for MRS Meetings. He is a featured scholar by the Global Medical Wearable Forum 2020 (San Jose) and an invited speaker in MRS meetings. In 2021, he was appointed as principal editor by MRS Advances and Associate Editor by Fronters in Medical Technology.