On Thursday 9th February, the hall of the Bellvitge University Hospital hosted the conference “Technology for health and medical research”, a session within the third edition of the cycle “The Mobile communications revolution” of the Mobile World Congress.

The event was sponsored by the City of Hospitalet de Llobregat and GSMA, the organizer of the Mobile World Congress 2017, with the collaboration of Bellvitge University Hospital, Bellvitge Biomedical Research Institute (IDIBELL) and the Department of Health.

The event was chaired by Dr. Antoni Andreu, General Director of Research and Innovation in Health of the Department of Health. Jordi Fàbrega, Director of Business Development at Biocat, began with the presentation of Moebio d·Health, a biocat disruptive talent development initiative to accelerate entrepreneurship in healthcare. Fàbrega stressed the importance of innovating from the need and explained an interesting training project to spot “in situ” opportunities for improvement in health centers and design customized solutions. Jordi Albó, associate professor at La Salle BCN, explained how research and clinical trials have shown that social and therapeutic robots improve the quality of life of several types of patients, such as children with autism.

Finally, Pol Pérez, general ICT coordinator of the Department of Health, exposed the perspectives and opportunities that technology poses to improve the relationship between doctor and patient. He presented the “My health” project and some of the mobile applications that are already working in the Catalan area. According to him, one of the most important challenges right now is to take advantage of the huge amount of information available.