Georgina Ferry interviews Cristian Roman, Postdoctoral Research Associate, 14 December 2022.
Topics discussed include (00:00:20) early interest in engineering, studies in France, the U.S.A. and U.K. at Oxford Brookes University, specialism in computer science and telecommunications, scholarship and PhD (00:04:54) move into digital health technologies and work on diabetes project; (00:07:30) outlook on digital health research globally; (00:09:12) joining Lionel Tarassenko's Biomedical Signal Processing & Machine Learning group in 2018; (00:11:51) remote monitoring project with blood pressure monitoring in stroke patients; (00:17:10) first awareness of COVID-19; (00:18:40) vHDU (virtual High-Dependency Unit) project on monitoring vital signs with wearable devices; (00:25:10) wearable devices; (00:30:47) the challenges of setting up the system over a three week time period; (00:34:00) first COVID patient; (00:34:52) communication with nurses from the Critical Care Research Group; (00:36:30) selection of patients to go on the system; (00:37:58) publications and evaluation of the system, including nurse interviews by Sarah Vollam and Peter Watkinson of the Critical Care Research Group; (00:40:00) current use of the system; (00:45:51) remote monitoring of blood pressure in pregnancy and postpartum, including work of Richard McManus and Lucy MacKillop on BUMP and POP-HT trials; (00:46:17) work with commercial company Sensyne Health; (00:48:13) usefulness of remote monitoring; (00:50:17) achievements and impact of work; (00:51:46) current projects; (00:53:30) personal threat from COVID-19; (00:58:02) impact of the project on wellbeing, collaborative work with Mauro Santos and Marco Pimentel; (01:02:40) changes in attitude to the future as a result of the pandemic, new technologies and robotics in healthcare.
