Electronics & ICT (ETRO): Crossing boudaries with visionary electronics & ICT

At a glance:

• Faculty: Engineering
• 101 researchers
• Main areas of expertise:
  • E-Health and Care
  • Data Mining
  • Non-destructive testing
  • Medical Imaging
  • Smart Networked Systems
  • Affective computing
  • Multimedia

ETRO's aim is to make sense of audio, video, hyper dimensional signals and sensors for various sectors.

www.etro.vub.ac.be

ETRO

Through multidisciplinary engineering ETRO performs research on a wide range of topics where electronics and informatics meet, such as

• E-Health and Care
• Data Mining
• Non-destructive testing
• Medical Imaging
• Smart Networked Systems
• Affective computing
• Multimedia

As founding member of the Strategic Research Center iMinds, she plays a leading innovation role within the Belgian ICT research community.

E-Health

Growing opportunities

Of particular importance within BruBotics is the work on E-Health performed by the ETRO researchers. E-Health is quickly becoming an important tool for the future of healthcare. Using novel technologies such as robots, low-cost visual sensors, serious gaming, virtual reality...a whole new range of possibilities are being opened up in the healthcare world.

Within ETRO a growing emphasis is therefore being placed on E-Health, one of several focus domains of the research group.

From helping children to helping older people

Some examples of projects where ETRO uses its technology and know-how to redefine healthcare:

• Develop an affordable, round-the-clock monitoring solution for assisted living facilities
• Unsupervised rehabilitation with remote patient (progress) monitoring
• Portable rehabilitation system using serious gaming
• Use intelligent social robots to help children with diabetes by offering training and entertainment

Wide range of application possibilities

Of course, most of the technologies and know-how developed can also be of use for other applications. ETRO researchers are for instance trying to find ways to use augmented reality to help with building construction, training of technicians and even to provide an extra experience when viewing ancient works of art.

SARA: Surgical Augmented Reality Assistance

The SARA project investigated the use of augmented reality to overlay a 3D rendering of medical images and planning information onto the patient’s anatomy during neurosurgery and orthopedic surgery to enhance the Computer Assisted Surgery (CAS) experience.

In het kort:

Het ETRO E-Health team gebruikt nieuwe technologiën als robots, virtual reality, augmented reality, serious games...om nieuwe mogelijkheden te creeëren in de gezondheidszorg. Dezelfde technologiën kunnen vervolgens ook ingezet worden in een zeer breed scala van toepassingen.