Biography
Bjoern M. Eskofier (SM, IEEE) heads the Machine Learning and Data Analytics (MaD) Lab at the Friedrich-Alexander-University Erlangen-Nuernberg (FAU). He is also the founding spokesperson of FAU’s Department Artificial Intelligence in Biomedical Engineering (AIBE), spokesperson of the German Ministry of Economic Affairs and Climate Action GAIA-X usecase project “TEAM-X” and co-director of the German Research Foundation collaborative research center “EmpkinS” (www.empkins.de). Since April 2023, he is an associate principal investigator and leader of the research group “Translational Digital Health” at the Helmholtz Zentrum Munich. Dr. Eskofier studied Electrical Engineering at the FAU and graduated in 2006. He then did his PhD in Biomechanics under the supervision of Prof. Dr. Benno Nigg at the University of Calgary (Canada). He authored more than 400 peer reviewed articles, holds 5 patents, started three spinoff startup companies, and is in a supporting role for further startups. He won several medical-technical research awards, including the “Curious Minds” award 2021 in “Life Sciences” by Manager Magazin and Merck and the “Unipreneurs” award 2023 from the German Minster of Education and Research and the German Minister for Economy. In 2016, he was a visiting professor in Prof. Paolo Bonato’s Motion Analysis Lab at Harvard Medical School (February-March), in 2018, he was a visiting professor in Prof. Alex “Sandy” Pentland’s Human Dynamics group at MIT Media Lab (March-August), and in 2023 (April-August, he was a visiting professor in Prof. Scott Delp’s NMBL lab that is part of Stanford University’s Schools of Engineering and Medicine. He serves as Area Editor for the “IEEE Open Access Journal of Engineering in Medicine and Biology” and Associate Editor for the “IEEE Journal of Biomedical and Health Informatics”. He is also active in the organization of several IEEE and ACM meetings (e.g., BSN, BHI, EMBC, IJCAI, ISWC, UbiComp), most recently as General Chair of BHI (IEEE Biomedical and Health Informatics Conference) 2023. Bjoern Eskofier has defined his research and entrepreneurial agenda to revolve around contributions to a “Digital Health Ecosystem”, where patients are connected to other stakeholders within the Healthcare system using digital support tools. His digital health research philosophy is that only multidisciplinary teams of engineers, medical experts, industry representatives and entrepreneurs will have the tools to actually implement changes in healthcare.
AI for future healthcare
Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) methods are currently a “hot topic” in medicine. The driver of AI or ML method employment, in medicine as well as in other domains, is the availability of digital data. Here, the potential of delivering more objective, precise, and personalized medical diagnosis and care decisions is by far not reached. The reason is that the current healthcare data infrastructure, both nationally and internationally, lacks interoperability and interfaces on several different levels (individual, institutional, device, and provider level, just to name a few). The health data infrastructure for future healthcare needs to address this. One favored solution is “personal health dataspaces”, which put individuals at the center of health data (figure) and create new opportunities for AI and ML applications.
The talk will present the core idea of personal health dataspaces and hint at some opportunities for the future AI-driven “digital” healthcare system that emerge from it. It will open up new possibilities in healthcare, which will hopefully contribute to delivering more objective, precise, and personalized medical diagnosis and care decisions.