Early and accurate diagnosis of diseases, as well as timely monitoring of diseases, are crucial for the efficient delivery of healthcare services.  Such technologies would also be useful to monitor geographical distributions of disease prevalence, including in outbreaks and epidemics.  Moreover, there is a strong clinical need for an equitable distribution of specialized healthcare services in remote and rural areas.  These challenges require an interdisciplinary approach, and as such, provide unique engineering challenges for technology development.  The focus areas of the session are:

1. Telemedicine (use of information technology for remote medical examinations, procedures, and consulting)
2. Expert Medical Systems (software that reproduces the knowledge of health experts)
3. Advanced Sensors and Systems (miniaturized sensors for disease diagnostics)
4. Medical Imaging (imaging of human body for disease diagnosis and monitoring)

These topics emphasize the cutting-edge research, technological challenges, and clinical applications in health diagnostics and disease monitoring, as well as overlapping research with other engineering disciplines that can help provide solutions to the overall global objective of “Health for All”.