Research group
Health Technology
We enable more high-quality health and sport technology products and solutions through research and development.
The research group in Health Technology produces research, development and innovation services for the needs of health and sport technology. We are an active expert partner of product developers. The research data, applications and operational procedures we produce can be used to create high-quality, data-based solutions to support quality of life, well-being and health.
The operations focus on the product development of medical devices in a strongly regulated operating environment, developing knowledge management by utilizing AI and data analytics, and the product development of technologies in different operational environments. We are a pioneer in producing synthetic health data, privacy-enhancing technologies, and ethical AI systems tailored to healthcare and sports domain. The infrastructure for our research is the Health Tech Lab, a test bed for health and sports technology.
Our key competences
- Product development of health technology devices in the regulatory environment (MDR)
- Producing synthetic health data
- Privacy-preserving solutions for secure processing of sensitive health data
- Utilizing ethical AI-systems in the health care domain
- Development of information systems and software development
- Usability and user-centered design and research (UI/UX)
Health technology is one of the fastest growing high technology sectors. Everyday life is becoming increasingly digital and the sector is becoming increasingly important. Our research team is aiming for stronger and deeper international cooperation in health technology, sport and physical activity.
Elina Kontio, Principal Lecturer, Research Group Leader
Infrastructure for research and development
Testbed Healt Tech Lab
Health Tech Lab is a health and sport technology testbed environment. In its operations, we utilize e.g., biosensory technology, data gathering, analysis software packages, machine learning and augmented reality. In the Health Tech Lab we develop digital healthcare services and carry out product development of medical devices together with the health sector’s organisations and companies. The laboratory’s equipment and expertise are available to our partners in joint research and development projects. The lab also works as learning environment, where students from the field of information and communications technology complete their studies.
Our Experts
The research group in Health Technology and the staff at Health Tech Lab includes professionals in the field of engineering and health, with dozens of years of experience in the field in total.
Most of our experts have defended their doctoral dissertations on topics related to artificial intelligence or programming. The staff has been involved in several research, product development and service projects and offered tailored education in the field of health technology to support organizations.
Case
SportTech and knowledge management
MyE.Way is an information system that supports player development and is used in Eerikkilä Sport & Outdoor resort and football and Finnish floorball sports federations as a tool to support coaching activities. The tool is based on a database containing the test values of more than 21,000 football players. The Health technology research group develops and maintains the MyE.Way system.
We continuously have several extensive research and development projects underway with our partners in Finland and internationally. Some of our projects are Horizon funded, and the results have also been patented.
Main publications
Khan, M.I., Jafaritadi, M., Alhoniemi, E., Kontio, E., Khan, S.A. (2022). Adaptive Weight Aggregation in Federated Learning for Brain Tumor Segmentation. In: Crimi, A., Bakas, S. (eds) Brainlesion: Glioma, Multiple Sclerosis, Stroke and Traumatic Brain Injuries. BrainLes 2021. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 12963. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-09002-8_40
Elina Kontio, Antti Airola, Tapio Pahikkala, Heljä Lundgren-Laine, Kristiina Junttila, Heikki Korvenranta, Tapio Salakoski, Sanna Salanterä. Predicting patient acuity from electronic patient records, Journal of Biomedical Informatics. Volume 51,
2014, Pages 35-40, ISSN 1532-0464, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jbi.2014.04.001.
M. I. Khan, E. Alhoniemi, E. Kontio, S. A. Khan and M. Jafaritadi, “RegAgg: A Scalable Approach for Efficient Weight Aggregation in Federated Lesion Segmentation of Brain MRIs,” 2023 Eighth International Conference on Fog and Mobile Edge Computing (FMEC), Tartu, Estonia, 2023, pp. 101-106, https://doi.org/10.1109/fmec59375.2023.10306171
Félix J, Moreira J, Santos R, Kontio E, Pinheiro AR, Sousa ASP. Health-Related Telemonitoring Parameters/Signals of Older Adults: An Umbrella Review. Sensors. 2023; 23(2):796. https://doi.org/10.3390/s23020796
Degree programmes related to our operations
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Bachelor's Degree, Path Studies
Information and Communications Technology, Bachelor of Engineering
Full-time StudiesTurku
Network & partners
The cooperation partners of the research lab include companies, hospital districts, municipalities, health care organisations, third sector actors, higher education institutions and research and development units. The research group in Health Technology is active in cooperating with the operators of Health Campus Turku and Tech Campus Turku in issues related to health technology. We also collaborate with the Department of Computing at the University of Turku and the Hospital District of Southwest Finland.
We are also a partner of the Health Campus Turku knowledge cluster and TERTTU collaboration platform, which brings together all the expertise and co-creation services at the campus through one channel.
Strong project skills
The Turku University of Applied Sciences Project Office offers support and guidance throughout the life cycle of an RDI project. Our project experts have years of experience and strong expertise in national and international funding programmes. We have more than 200 projects running every year, and our RDI activities have received more than €10 million in external funding.