The BioCAS (Biomedical Circuits and Systems Conference) in London was hosted by the Institute of Biomedical Engineering of Imperial College and held within the Conference Centre of the British Library. The conference itself was timed to coincide with the opening of the new Institute of Biomedical Engineering and consisted of three days (29 November to 1 December) of “Insight Tutorials” and technical reports. The material presented at the conference covered a wide range of topics in the broad area of Biomedical Circuits and Systems gathered together under the banner “Using technology to meet the challenges of healthcare”.

The conference venue was excellent, and allowed for an awe inspiring cocktail reception in the shadow of the King’s Library collection. December in London, of course, was cold and blustery. The only other glitch in an otherwise smooth conference program was a fire alarm in the British Library which resulted in half a day’s program being abandoned and subsequently reorganized.

A large number of tutorial sessions as well as a wide range of speakers from both academia and industry made this meeting particularly attractive. Several of the speakers, especially for tutorial and plenary sessions were senior representative of major information technology and healthcare companies. In addition several industrial representatives participated as observers. Tutorial session covered a range of topics under the broad headings of Body Sensor Networks; Bionics and Bio-inspiration; and Biomaterials and Devices. Technical sessions presented new work in the areas of (among other things): Biosensors; Biosignal Processing; Bioinformatics; Instrumentation; Low Power Circuits; Image Processing; Radio Technology and Implantable Monitoring.

A common thread through many of the tutorials (and also some of the technical presentations) was the “disruptive” nature of emergent healthcare technologies. That is, these technologies will or are restructuring various industries, and in some cases giving rise to entirely new industries. Charles Scatchard (Vice President, Oracle Europe) and Leonard Fass (GE Healthcare UK) gave several  examples of such technologies. Applications could include, for example, the development of sensors and IT technology focussed on enforcing (or rather “encouraging”) better patient compliance, in terms of patients actually taking prescribed drugs when prescribed. Here, as elsewhere, the financial significance of the healthcare sector, the impending aging global population, and the rise in (for example) obesity related illness were emphasized.

Other important areas for both research and development were raised by Rahul Sarpeshkar (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) and Tamás Roska (Hungarian Academy of Sciences). Prof. Sarpeshkar spoke on the obvious importance of ultra-low powered computing for biomedical systems, and in particular body sensor networks. The area of body sensor networks was also the focus of a review by Ben Lo (Imperial College) and Yuan-Ting Zhang (Chinese University of Hong Kong) described various possible implementations of such systems. Prof. Roska’s talk, described the extension of cellular neural networks to cellular wave computing, and the physical realization of such nano-scale devices. He described how each node in the network can, in effect, be made to act as an independent Turing machine (i.e. as well as impulse response, the individual cells are also capable of logic and have a stored memory).

Of greatest interest to me personally were the tutorial sessions on Bio-inspiration and Body Sensor networks. I also found that the technical sessions on Biosignal processing and Biosignal classification included several interesting papers. Finally, I found the timing and location of the conferences to be excellent. Moreover, the provision by the organizers, of a three-day London transport travel pass provided opportunity to complete ample Christmas shopping.