Goodbye Hospitals, Hello Implant Sensors | Thomas J Webster

Summary :
⁣COVID-19 highlighted numerous failures in our global healthcare system including overcrowded hospitals, lack of preventative versus reactionary medicine, and overall missing healthcare monitoring at home. Implantable sensors include an active area of research in which materials monitor health on-demand 24 hrs a day, 7 days a week. This invited talk will discuss how implantable sensors will revolutionize healthcare enabling us to get away from the traditional oldfashion hospital based system, which clearly was not sufficient during COVID. Several examples of implantable sensors will be provided in this talk including but not limited to the growth of sensors off of medical devices that can determine bone growth, infection, and inflammation next to orthopedic implants; the use of piezoelectric implantable sensors that can sense changes in motion to detect diseases; the use of contact lenses that can sense changes in metabolites in tears to diagnose diseases; and the use magnetic materials to sense changes in magnetic fields to diagnose diseases. In all cases, such implantable sensors are not only being used to prevent and diagnose diseases but also treat diseases. Novel materials, most notably nanomaterials, have enabled the fabrication and use of such sensors across all of medicine.

About Author :
⁣Thomas J. Webster’s (H index: 117; Google Scholar) degrees are in chemical engineering from the University of Pittsburgh (B.S., 1995; USA) and in biomedical engineering from RPI (Ph.D., 2000; USA). He has served as a professor at Purdue (2000-2005), Brown (2005-2012), and Northeastern (2012-2021; serving as Chemical Engineering Department Chair from 2012 - 2019) Universities and has formed over a dozen companies who have numerous FDA approved medical products currently improving human health. He is currently helping those companies and serves as a professor at Hebei University of Technology, Saveetha University, UFPI, and others. Dr. Webster has numerous awards including: 2020, World Top 2% Scientist by Citations (PLOS); 2020, SCOPUS Highly Cited Research (Top 1% Materials Science and Mixed Fields); 2021, Clarivate Top 0.1% Most Influential Researchers (Pharmacology and Toxicology); 2022, Best Materials Science Scientist by Citations (Research.com); and is a fellow of over 8 societies. Prof. Webster is a former President of the U.S. Society For Biomaterials and has over 1,350 publications to his credit with over 53,000 citations. He was recently nominated for the Nobel Prize in Chemistry (2023).