Technologies for Health & Well-Being
Digital Health Technologies
Digital health is the convergence of digital technologies with health, healthcare, living, and society to enhance the efficiency of healthcare delivery and make medicines more personalized and precise. The discipline involves the use of information and communication technologies to help address the health problems and challenges faced by people under treatment. These technologies include both hardware and software solutions and services, including telemedicine, web-based analysis, email, mobile phones and applications, text messages, wearable devices, and clinic or remote monitoring sensors.Generally, digital health is concerned about the development of interconnected health systems and Internet of Medical Things (IoMT) to improve the use of computational technologies, smart devices, computational analysis techniques, and communication media to aid healthcare professionals and their clients manage illnesses and health risks, as well as promote health and well-being.
Clinical and Health Research for Well-Being and Human Performance
Technological advances in science have become crucial for the rapid progression of medical and health sciences delivery and research. Developing new collaborative tools and approaches and defining new methodologies to improve the health of the population, while engaging patients and encouraging them to take accountability for maintaining their own health, will play a key role in improving the outcomes and transforming healthcare delivery.
Biomechanics
Biomechanics is the science of movement of a living body, including how muscles, bones, tendons, and ligaments work together to produce movement.Biomechanics is part of the larger field of kinesiology, specifically focusing on the mechanics of the movement.
Modern Biotechnology
At its simplest, biotechnology is technology based on biology - biotechnology harnesses cellular and biomolecular processes to develop technologies and products that help improve our lives and the health of our planet. We have used the biological processes of microorganisms for more than 6,000 years to make useful food products, such as bread and cheese, and to preserve dairy products.
Modern biotechnology provides breakthrough products and technologies to combat debilitating and rare diseases, reduce our environmental footprint, feed the hungry, use less and cleaner energy, and have safer, cleaner and more efficient industrial manufacturing processes.Currently, there are more than 250 biotechnology health care products and vaccines available to patients, many for previously untreatable diseases. More than 13.3 million farmers around the world use agricultural biotechnology to increase yields, prevent damage from insects and pests and reduce farming's impact on the environment. And more than 50 biorefineries are being built across North America to test and refine technologies to produce biofuels and chemicals from renewable biomass, which can help reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
https://www.bio.org/what-biotechnology
Modern biotechnology provides breakthrough products and technologies to combat debilitating and rare diseases, reduce our environmental footprint, feed the hungry, use less and cleaner energy, and have safer, cleaner and more efficient industrial manufacturing processes.Currently, there are more than 250 biotechnology health care products and vaccines available to patients, many for previously untreatable diseases. More than 13.3 million farmers around the world use agricultural biotechnology to increase yields, prevent damage from insects and pests and reduce farming's impact on the environment. And more than 50 biorefineries are being built across North America to test and refine technologies to produce biofuels and chemicals from renewable biomass, which can help reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
https://www.bio.org/what-biotechnology
Bioinformatics, Imaging and Personalized Health
In the last few decades, we have undergone an unprecedented transformation of biomedical research, requiring a novel paradigm of data-driven biomedical science to complement well-developed hypothesis-driven knowledge discovery. Along with high-throughput genome sequencing, healthcare organizations have started to embrace extraction of information from digitalized clinical records and imaging data. The outstanding improvement in automated collection of massive data volumes is exemplified by community movements such as the Global Alliance for Genomics and Health, research infrastructures like ELIXIR and Big Data to Knowledge (BD2K), and international initiatives such as the International Cancer Genome Consortium (ICGC), the International Human Epigenome Consortium (IHEC), and the International Rare Disease Consortium (IRDiRC), among others. The accessibility to ‘big data’, a term first introduced in 1997 in the context of data visualization sets down both an exceptional and ambitious challenge for biomedical research, with special emphasis on Personalized Medicine. A typical portrait of biomedical big data features heterogeneous, multi-spectral, incomplete, and imprecise observations. Hence, data-intensive analytics require ad hoc capabilities for complex data representation and modeling, algorithmic optimization, and computational power. In healthcare, for instance, such systems are defined by five distinctive capabilities: patterns of care identification, unstructured data analysis, decision support, prediction, and traceability. Nonetheless, data gathering moves faster than both data processing and data analysis, emphasizing the widening gap between the rapid technological progress in data acquisition and the comparatively slow functional characterization of biomedical information. In this regard, the integration of molecular information, such as multi-omics data, and the phenotypic information of individual patients from electronic health records (EHRs), is becoming of critical importance. Considering the relevance of biomedical data protection, efficient and secure models for storage, integration, data-driven discovery, and interpretation must distinguish big data analytics systems for Personalized Medicine. (revised from https://doi.org/10.1016/j.copbio.2019.03.004)
Biotechnology at Lakehead University
Biotechnology is a field of study that uses living organisms or cellular and bio-molecular processes to make new products, solve problems, or provide new methods of production.
The start of the Biotechnology PhD program in 2007 strengthened Lakehead's involvement in biotechnology initiatives in Northwestern Ontario, providing opportunities for a broad range of industry partnerships. By successfully combining the focus and expertise of faculty in sciences and engineering into two interdisciplinary areas of biotechnology: Environmental Biotechnology and Medical Biotechnology, Lakehead placed itself at the forefront of cutting-edge biotechnology research in the Thunder Bay area. The Ph.D. in Biotechnology at Lakehead is a research-based, interdisciplinary graduate program focused on the professional development of scientists in theses two areas.
Scientific and technological advances have transformed biotechnology techniques, opening the door to a variety of applications in areas such as health care, the environment, forestry, and industrial processes. Lakehead is a comprehensive university with a reputation for innovative programs and relevant research.
The start of the Biotechnology PhD program in 2007 strengthened Lakehead's involvement in biotechnology initiatives in Northwestern Ontario, providing opportunities for a broad range of industry partnerships. By successfully combining the focus and expertise of faculty in sciences and engineering into two interdisciplinary areas of biotechnology: Environmental Biotechnology and Medical Biotechnology, Lakehead placed itself at the forefront of cutting-edge biotechnology research in the Thunder Bay area. The Ph.D. in Biotechnology at Lakehead is a research-based, interdisciplinary graduate program focused on the professional development of scientists in theses two areas.
Scientific and technological advances have transformed biotechnology techniques, opening the door to a variety of applications in areas such as health care, the environment, forestry, and industrial processes. Lakehead is a comprehensive university with a reputation for innovative programs and relevant research.