Featured speakers

Professor Carissa A. Low, Assistant Professor of Medicine, Psychology, and Biomedical Informatics, University of Pittsburgh, US

TITLE: Opportunities for Mobile Sensing in Patient-Centered Research

ABSTRACT: As smartphones and consumer wearable devices become more ubiquitous, there is a growing opportunity to capture rich mobile sensor data continuously, passively, and in real-world settings with minimal burden. Changes in these passively sensed digital biomarkers may reflect meaningful variation in patient functional status, symptom burden, quality of life, and risk for adverse clinical outcomes. This talk will highlight recent and ongoing research leveraging mobile sensing for remote monitoring of cancer patients between clinical encounters and for personalization of behavioral interventions and will discuss challenges and opportunities in applying these novel methods to clinical research and care.

Professor Carissa A. Low is an Assistant Professor of Medicine, Psychology, and Biomedical Informatics and Director of the Mobile Sensing and Health Institute at the University of Pittsburgh and Adjunct Faculty in the Human-Computer Interaction Institute at Carnegie Mellon University. She received her PhD in clinical health psychology from UCLA in 2008 and completed her internship and postdoctoral training at the University of Pittsburgh before joining the faculty in late 2013. She has a broad background in clinical health psychology, with specific expertise leveraging mobile technology for remote oncology patient monitoring as well as delivery and personalization of behavioral interventions. She recently completed a NCI Career Development Award testing a just-in-time sedentary behavior smartwatch intervention before and after cancer surgery and received a NCI R37 MERIT award developing a mobile sensing system for real-time severe symptom detection during chemotherapy.
BIO
Prof George Panos, BSc(Biomed. Eng.), CEng, MIET, MD, PhD, DTM&H(Lon), FRCP. Former Professor, Internal Medicine, School of Medicine of the University of Cyprus and at the Nicosia General Hospital Internal Medicine Clinic

TITLE: Technological Challenges to assist in the clinical management towards the Pandemic Response

ABSTRACT:

COVID-19 pandemic created tremendous pressure of patient load on the health systems and especially in hospitals challenging their ability to effectively monitor COVID-19 inpatients disease progression and provide the appropriate treatment in a timely manner. Approximately 4% of COVID 19 positive patients need hospitalization and of these an estimated 2.5% end up in ICUs and Units for Special Care. Technological challenges to record and manage the mounting epidemiological and clinical data which ultimately translated to patients’ health, inevitably led to the design and implementation of a unified electronic surveillance and management platform almost immediately by the medical and engineering community that ingeniously utilized technological devices and IT solutions to deliver a real time web based covid-19 electronic health record. This covid-19 eHealth platform is categorized in three main sections a) Demographics, allergies, comorbidities, symptoms and date of symptoms onset including a self-assessment of symptom severity development by time and date, vital signs, oxymetry, current medication b) Hospital admission details (bed/ward/department), patient summary and continuous cumulative graph depictions of vital signs, oxygen status (oximetry SpO2/FiO2 and/or blood gases pO2/FiO2) and scoring systems (e.g. Acute Respiratory Distress Syndrome, Modified Early Warning System and Glasgow Coma Scale), ECG-QTc estimation c) Daily comprehensive real-time web based COVID-19 electronic health record (patient history, clinical examination, lab exams, treatment regimens) with simple timeline statistical permutation depictions.

Prof George Panos, BSc(Biomed. Eng.), CEng, MIET, MD, PhD, DTM&H(Lon), FRCP. Former Professor, Internal Medicine, School of Medicine of the University of Cyprus and at the Nicosia General Hospital Internal Medicine Clinic (male). He studied Biomedical Electronic Engineering at the University of Salford, UK, before studying Medicine and graduating with an MD degree from the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens Medical School. He subsequently specialized in Internal Medicine at the 1st Internal Medicine Clinic of the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens Medical School, Laikon General Hospital, Athens and subsequently trained in Infectious Diseases at the 1st Propaedeutic Internal Medicine Clinic at the same University and hospital. Dr. Panos obtained a PhD degree from the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens Medical School. He served as a Consultant Physician and Head of the Special Infections Unit/HIV Unit at Penteli General Hospital, Athens. Dr George Panos has served as a Senior Registrar-Junior Consultant at Birmingham Heartlands Hospital (Teaching), UK, Department of Infection and Tropical Medicine when he also obtained the Diploma in Tropical Medicine and Hygiene (DTM&H(Lon)) and, as a Clinical Research Fellow at Chelsea and Westminster Hospital, St. Stephen’s Centre, London, UK when he described a New Clinical Syndrome in HIV seropositive individuals. He has 137 publications in International Medical Journals with >14500 citations and an h index of 51 in scholar google.
BIO
Professor Joshua S Weitz, Tom and Marie Patton Professor of Biological Sciences, Georgia Institute of Technology, US

TITLE: Modeling, Interventions, and the Ongoing Need for Pandemic Response and Mitigation Instruments

ABSTRACT: The Covid-19 pandemic continues to impact the health and well-being of communities all across the globe. From the outset, epidemic theory and models have played a key role in advancing understanding of the potential threat and in shaping public health responses. In this talk, I will highlight both near- and long-term challenges in controlling Covid-19. In doing so, I will focus on efforts to characterize non-canonical features of spread (including gathering-associated risk, behavioral feedback, and the impacts of heterogeneity) as well as efforts to use testing (including PCR and serological tests) as a means to mitigate and control spread. In closing, I will also highlight lessons learned and ongoing opportunities for use-inspired theory and modeling initiatives to enhance response, decision-making, and mitigation instruments.

Prof. Joshua S. Weitz is the Tom and Marie Patton Professor of Biological Sciences and the Founding Director of the Quantitative Biosciences Graduate Program at the Georgia Institute of Technology. He received his PhD in Physics from MIT in 2003, was a NSF Postdoctoral Fellow in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at Princeton University from 2003-6, and started his faculty position in Biology at Georgia Tech in 2007. Weitz is a Fellow of AAAS and the American Academy of Microbiology and his team’s work is supported, in part, by the Simons Foundation, NIH, NSF, ARO, CDC, and the Burroughs Wellcome Fund. Weitz leads a multidisciplinary research team whose central goal is to understand how viruses transform human health and the fate of our planet.
BIO
Ads
Event Search