Mobile health technologies with applications in medicine
Luis Pacheco, Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School

The application of mobile devices to healthcare (including smartphones, tablets and wearable devices) is now defined as mobile Health (mHealth). mHealth is increasingly becoming a prominent part of the healthcare system and holds promising for improving patients’ access to diagnosis and treatment and for enhancing adherence and self-management of treatment regimens, particularly in resource-limited settings. Smartphone-based biosensing systems perfectly meet the mHealth diagnostics concept, as they can be used in a decentralized manner, have increasing data processing capabilities with low-to-moderate cost, and can be fully integrated with the public-health databases through the internet. At Prof. Hadi Shafiee’s Lab (Brigham and Women’s Hospital / Harvard Medical School; https://shafieelab.bwh.harvard.edu/) we have been developing smartphone-coupled mHealth technologies that have successfully been translated to reproductive health applications, including sperm quality analysis and ovulation testing, and also for infectious diseases diagnostics, such as Zika virus detection and HIV viral load quantitation. We employ a highly interdisciplinary approach to develop these technologies, combining microfluidics, nanotechnology, 3D printing, mobile microscopy and artificial intelligence. In this seminar I will present some of these recent technologies that have been developed by our group, with particular focus on the use of mobile phone-based imaging for mHealth diagnostics development.

Dr. Luis Pacheco is currently a Visiting Researcher at the Shafiee Laboratory, Brigham and Women’s Hospital / Harvard Medical School, through the CAPES/ Harvard Junior Visiting Professor/ Researcher Program. He is also an Assistant Professor of Biotechnology at the Universidade Federal da Bahia (UFBA), in Brazil. He received his 2010 PhD in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology from a leading university in Brazil, the Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais (UFMG), with an international split-site scholarship period (2008-2009) at the University of Warwick, in the United Kingdom. His research is focused on using functional genomics and synthetic biology approaches for development of novel genetic tools with broad applications in biotechnology, particularly in the fields of diagnostics of infectious diseases and therapeutics of inflammatory diseases.