Josep Solà
Passionate about the intersection of engineering and clinical work, Josep has spent 15 years doing research and development in the field of cuffless blood pressure monitoring. He graduated as a signal processing engineer at the Catalonia Polytechnic University (UPC), then completed his Master's Thesis at Sony International in Germany, before ultimately arriving in Switzerland in 2004 at the Swiss Center for Electronics and Microtechnogy (CSEM). At that time the Swiss institute was revolutionizing the field of wearable monitoring by showcasing the first measurements of Heart Rate at the wrist via optical sensors in motion. Interested in signal processing problems for non-invasive cardiovascular monitoring, he started exploring and benchmarking sensing modalities that could potentially lead to more widespread use of cuffless blood pressure devices. His research covered hybrid uses of Photo-Plethysmograhy (PPG), Electro-Cardiography (ECG), Impedance Cardiography (ICG), Phono-Cardiography (PCG) and Electrical Impedance Tomography (EIT). In 2012 he completed his PhD thesis at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich (ETHZ), titled “Continuous blood pressure monitoring.” He then focused all his efforts on how PPG sensing could be upgraded to provide clinically valuable blood pressure determinations in real life scenarios. In 2018 he co-founded Aktiia, a tech company that aims at bringing blood pressure monitoring to daily life.
Ricard Delgado-Gonzalo is the principal research scientist leading the Digital Health activity at the Swiss Center for Electronics and Microtechnology (CSEM). Trained as a Mathematician and as an Engineer at the Polytechnic University of Catalonia (UPC), he obtained his Ph.D. on biomedical image analysis from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne (EPFL) within the SystemsX.ch consortium, the Swiss research initiative for the promotion of Systems Biology. He was awarded with theSSBE Research Award 2013 from the Swiss Society of Biomedical Engineering for the best PhD thesis, and the ABB Award 2014 for his “contributions to the field of bioimage informatics.” His current research focuses on AI applied to biomedical embedded systems, wearable technology, and their impact on the future of healthcare and the MedTech industry with more than 40 scientific publications on the topic.