Impacting healthcare through collaborative technology innovations
Mohanasankar Sivaprakasam
Indian Institute of Technology, Madra
1:30-3:00pm Monday, 7 October 2019, ITE325, UMBC
India’s healthcare scenario presents a set of unique challenges to ensure effective delivery of care to the large population suffering from various communicable and non communicable diseases. The medical devices market in India is largely catered by imports, most of which were not designed to handle the constraints and requirements of country’s care delivery system and market. While this presents a significant challenge to established players, it is an exciting opportunity for innovators and entrepreneurs to create and scale indigenous technology solutions tailored to local needs. However, development of affordable technology solutions which create large impact, and can achieve scale in India requires a deep understanding of the care delivery system and strong partnerships with various stakeholders of the ecosystem.
Healthcare Technology Innovation Centre of IIT Madras focuses on developing and commercializing affordable healthcare technologies through its team of over 200 engineers, doctors, researchers, students and entrepreneurs working with more than 30 medical institutions, industries, government agencies. The talk will highlight some of its technology successes and the use of AI and machine learning in tackling the healthcare challenges. The potential of these technologies beyond Indian market will be discussed.
Mohanasankar Sivaprakasam is a faculty of Electrical Engineering at IIT Madras and Director of the Healthcare Technology Innovation Centre (HTIC), a R&D centre of IIT Madras. After his PhD and postdoctoral research in US in implantable medical devices for 8 years, he returned to India with goal of developing affordable medical technologies in the country. Since 2009, he has successfully built an ecosystem of technologists, clinicians and industry, culminating in setting up of Healthcare Technology Innovation Centre (HTIC) in 2011. Over the years, HTIC has grown into a unique and leading med-tech innovation ecosystem in the country bringing together more than 20 medical institutions, industry, government agencies, collaborating with HTIC in developing affordable medical technologies for unmet healthcare needs. He has more than 70 peer reviewed publications in journals and conferences.