After being welcomed by Mayor of Bamberg Andreas Starke and Chairman of Medical Valley EMN Prof. Erich R. Reinhardt, both Mr. Aiwanger and Bavaria’s Minister of Health Melanie Huml gave opening speeches, during which the Minister of Economic Affairs announced funding notifications for four innovation projects. These included Mobile Health Lab and Medical Valley Digital Health Application Center, both of which have their roots in Fraunhofer IIS. The two outfits explore digital solutions for cutting-edge medicine and are driving telemedical care forward by bridging the gap between patients and physicians.

Mobile Health Lab in Bamberg is using telemedicine to open up access to healthcare from the home. It is working on a generic IT platform for telemedicine, the “Digital Patient Manager.” Its aim is to establish a network that connects service providers across all sectors and to create a decentralized infrastructure for medical communication. The system enables the automatic collection of individual patient data and its exchange between users and their healthcare provider (physician, hospital, therapist), with patients themselves determining who has access to which parts of their data. Likewise, healthcare providers can make all relevant information available to patients using the same system. The generic platform can be adapted to the specific needs of healthcare providers and can also be licensed by them. This will accelerate market penetration and help connect the service providers, making completely new telemedical healthcare services possible.

Medical Valley Digital Health Application Center is also based in Bamberg. Designed to run over five years, the project is intended to pave the way for and also accompany new innovations and products in medical engineering, besides supporting companies as they prepare for the digital medicine of tomorrow. The project integrates ideas into medical care and research and monitors patient-centered development and validation studies. It aims to make technical solutions accessible to everyone in a newly evolving digital health ecosystem.

First convention and discussion panel

After the official ceremony, the center held its first convention, which was kicked off by Prof. Jochen Klucken (Medical Valley Digital Health Application Center) and Christian Weigand (Mobile Health Lab), among others. The two Fraunhofer groups held one of the three symposia under the banner of Parkinson’s care of the future.

Following various lectures on the disease, a discussion panel featuring renowned names such as Prof. Albert Heuberger (Director of Fraunhofer IIS) and Prof. Joachim Hornegger (President of the FAU) alongside Minister of Health Ms. Huml rounded off the symposium with the topic “What can we do together to actively harness the opportunities posed by digitalization?”.

Find out more about Mobile Health Lab here.