Summary:
Three recommendations have emerged from Lord Darzi’s independent investigation of the NHS in England: moving from analogue to digital, transferring care from the hospital to the community and focusing on prevention as much as treatment. The talk will address the first two of these priorities by reviewing our development in Oxford during the last decade of new products for the NHS using the latest advances in digital technologies (smartphones, wearables, apps and machine learning).
The talk will describe a gestational diabetes app, a digital tool for the self-management of COPD, and a ‘hospital-at-home’ solution inspired by our use of wearables on COVID-19 isolation wards. It will consider not only the technical aspects but also integration into clinical pathways and the importance of healthcare policy. To finish on a positive note, the talk will conclude with an overview of our latest research, which aims to move the sleep laboratory from the hospital to the home, enabled by the latest machine learning techniques.
About the speaker:
Professor Lord (Lionel) Tarassenko CBE FREng FMedSci is a world-leading expert in the application of signal processing, artificial intelligence and machine learning to healthcare, with a strong track record in translation to clinical medicine.
Professor Tarassenko was born in Paris in 1957. He received the BA in Engineering Science in 1978 and a doctorate in medical electronics in 1985, both from the University of Oxford. He was elected to the Chair of Electrical Engineering, also at the University of Oxford in 1997. He was the driving force behind the creation of the Institute of Biomedical Engineering (IBME) which he directed from its opening in April 2008 to October 2012. Under his leadership, the IBME grew from 110 to 220 academic researchers, and it was awarded a Queen’s Anniversary Prize for Higher Education in 2015 for “new collaborations between engineering and medicine delivering benefit to patients”.
Professor Tarassenko’s work has had a major impact on the identification of deterioration in acute care and on the management of chronic disease. The system which he designed for patient monitoring in critical care was the first machine learning system to gain FDA approval (in 2008).
Professor Tarassenko was elected to a Fellowship of the Royal Academy of Engineering in 2000, and to a Fellowship of the Academy of Medical Sciences in 2013. He is the author of 300 journal papers, 240 conference papers, 3 books and 32 granted patents. He is a director of the University’s technology transfer company, Oxford University Innovation, and has founded four University spin-out companies. He was the Head of the Department of Engineering Science (Dean of Engineering) from 2014 to 2019, and was the Editor-in-Chief for the Topol Review “Preparing the healthcare workforce to deliver the digital future” in 2019. He is now the Founding President of Reuben College, the University of Oxford’s newest college.
Lionel Tarassenko was made a CBE for services to engineering in the 2012 New Year’s Honours List and appointed as a non-party political life peer in May 2024.