Hugo Plácido da Silva

PhD in Electrical and Computers Engineering from the Instituto Superior Técnico (IST) – University of Lisbon, since 2004 Hugo is a researcher at the IT – Instituto de Telecomunicações (https://www.it.pt/person_detail_p.asp?id=1293) and a Professor at EST/IPS – Escola Superior de Tecnologia do Instituto Politécnico de Setúbal (https://www.estsetubal.ips.pt/) since 2016. In 2012 he was a visiting researcher at the Computational and NeuroEngineering Laboratory (CNEL) from the University of Florida. He is co-founder of PLUX – Wireless Biosignals (https://www.plux.info), established in 2007 as an innovative technology-based company operating in the field of medical devices for healthcare and quality of life, where he is currently Chief Innovation Officer.

More recently, Hugo has been actively working towards making the world a bit more physiological, through BITalino (https://www.bitalino.com), an open source software and low-cost hardware toolkit, that allows anyone from students to professional app developers, to create cool projects and applications with physiological sensors.

His main interest interests include biosignal research, system engineering, signal processing, and pattern recognition, and his work has been distinguished with several academic and technical awards such as the “Best Industrial and Enabling Technology” at the European Commission’s DG-CONNECT Innovation Radar Prize in 2017 with the project “BITalino”, the 1st place at the Ordem dos Engenheiros Young Engineer Innovation Award in 2015 with the project “BIT: Biosignal Igniter Toolkit”, the 1st place at the Venture Day Lisbon in 2013 with the project “Vitalidi: Your Heart (h)as a Key!”, the selection as a semi-finalist to the Engadget Expand NY Inset Coin competition in 2013, the Life Sciences Award in 2010 at a yearly venture competition co-promoted by the MIT, and the “Caixa Geral de Depósitos Award” from 2003 to 2005 for recognized academic merit.

Title: Electrocardiography (ECG) in an IoT World

Abstract

Electrocardiography (ECG) is an established standard medical practice and a mainstream diagnostic technique. Although the first practical implementations of devices for human use can be dated back to 1887, measurement methods are still mostly bound to hospital and short-time monitoring settings. With prevention being one of the main pillars for managing the risks associated with cardiovascular diseases management, new solutions with the potential to complement current practices, and accelerate early detection of abnormal conditions, are prone to play a major role.

In this talk we will look into the opportunities and future prospects enabled by non-intrusive ECG sensing, which can lead to better cardiovascular disease management, especially in what concerns prevention and early detection. By using sensors integrated in everyday use objects (e.g. a computer keyboard, a mobile phone, a PlayStation controller, or a TV remote control) rather than being attached to the body of the person, one can pave the way for ECG data acquisition to become more pervasive and seamlessly integrated in multiple aspects of peoples everyday lives.

Such a transformative approach also has its challenges, ranging from topics such as materials, sensor design, denoising, user recognition, and many others. In this talk we will cover the fundamentals, current stage and future prospects of how ECG data acquisition can be improved in era of the Internet-of-Things (IoT).