Prof. Ratko Magjarević of University of Zagreb; International Federation for Medical and Biological Engineering (IFMBE)

It is common knowledge that the population around the world is getting older and it is aging faster than ever as shown in e.g. the recent WHO Study on global ageing and adult health (SAGE). Due to the presence of chronic diseases, elderly require extended use of many services from the health care system which presents a burden for the health care workforce and opens additionally numerous economical, technical, and clinical issues. There are a lot of expectations from smart technologies, specially from application of artificial intelligence to increasing the health and wellbeing of the elderly population. Researchers are approaching the abovementioned issues in two ways: either aiming at the individual level to ensure personalised approach to the patient and slowing down his/her aging process, or aiming at the population level to establish effective health policies and public health interventions to decelerate aging in global population as well as to prevent rising of often unsustainable costs. A large part of information that is entering into patients’ health records and decision-making systems is based on measurements, monitoring, and data acquisition. The quality of that input significantly impacts the quality of the interventions and results of the analytics. In recent years, we have contributed to shaping some policy documents on healthy aging within the EU, though their implementation was slowed down by the COVID pandemics. Our research is recently devoted to improving connectivity architecture and methods for IoT and wearable devices, development of an eco-system for management and self-management of diabetes and handling missing data in CGM records, segmentation and classification of human movements during exercising and rehabilitation and optimizing human fall detection circuits and algorithms.

Biography:

Ratko Magjarević received his Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering in 1994 from the University of Zagreb, Faculty of Electrical Engineering. After his appointment in industry at the Institute of Electrical Engineering “Koncar,“ he joined the Electronic Measurement and Biomedical Engineering Group at the University of Zagreb Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Computing. He is full professor teaching several courses in Electronic Instrumentation and Biomedical Engineering at undergraduate, graduate and at postgraduate studies. 

His scientific and professional interest is in fields of electronic and biomedical instrumentation and digital health, in particular in cardiac potentials analysis and pacing, in research of new methods for drug delivery based on electropermeabilisation and recently in research of personalized intelligent mobile health systems. He is author or co-author of numerous journal and conference papers, several textbooks and book chapters. R. Magjarevic is elected for President of the International Federation for Medical and Biological Engineering (IFMBE) from 2022 to 2025.