MediaTek Incorporated has joined hands with NTU and NTU Hospital to set up a new research and development innovation Center for Medical Electronics Technology. The Center is aimed to meet the demand for personalized, remote medical diagnosis and treatment and home care that is growing due to the rapid aging of local society. This project is significant for cooperation between local academia and industry in the electrical engineering, medical treatment and electronics, and it is expected to set a new international milestone for the integration of research and development across biomedicine, computing and electronics. NTU President Si-chen Lee, NTU Hospital Superintendent Ming-fong Chen and MediaTek Chairman Ming-kai Tsai held a signing ceremony formalizing the partnership on May 6.

The Center will research and develop an integrated remote-sensing medical platform to provide physicians with patients’ physiological data over distance in real time. The platform will rely on sensors that the patients attach to their own bodies. The sensors will gather the patient’s information and relay it to doctors via a wireless network. In the future, this personalized treatment technology will allow patients to give themselves physical examinations and manage their own personal health at any time or place. The patients’ biomedical test results will be uploaded in a cloud network by which physicians and medical teams will monitor patients’ physical conditions and make medical diagnoses. This system will create an improved, patient-oriented treatment environment that will allow efficient use of medical resources and improve patient quality of life by saving patients the inconvenience and discomfort of making repeated trips between home and hospital.

The Center will have four research teams. The biomedical signal processing team will apply advanced algorithms to signal processing to enable caregivers to quickly obtain a patient’s biodata, while the wireless and medical systems team will integrate wireless technology with medical equipment to permit the remote measurement, acquisition and storage of medical and physical data.

The biomedical sensor IC team will place sensors on microchips in developing affordable and dependable sensor chips that are energy efficient and require no batteries, and the national-level clinical trials team will conduct tests of the electronic medical components and systems in a clinical environment.

The Center is expected to become a global research leader in medical electronics and lead NTU into a new golden age of semiconductors.