„Joint Call for Research Proposals – Global Health Initiative”

Details about Global Health projects

Integrated Care for Older Adults Living in Urban Areas – Assessing Health and Social Care Needs, Prof. Wolfram Herrmann, Charité – Universitätsmedizin Berlin, und Associate Prof. Angelique Chan, NUS

In this project, researchers from Singapore and Berlin come together and examine the challenges presented by demographic development and urbanization for the healthcare of tomorrow. The focus is on assessing the needs of older people in the context of medical and social care in an urban environment. The project aims to strengthen the collaboration of researchers working on the topic of care for the elderly across health systems and cultural boundaries.

Smart wearables and digital health interventions, Prof. Roland Eils, Charité – Universitätsmedizin Berlin, und Prof. Falk Mueller-Riemenschneider, NUS

Smartphones and smart wearables offer considerable potential for public health and personalized medicine. However, this development is not without its challenges; for example, there is limited evidence of effectiveness, interest and use tend to drop off dramatically over time, and the health-related data collected is often complex and incomplete. The project establishes close interdisciplinary collaboration within existing intervention projects in Berlin and Singapore with the goal of expanding existing expertise at both locations and further developing standardized approaches and solutions for dealing with smart wearables.

The retina as a window to vascular and neurological disorders, Dr. rer. medic. Hanna G. Zimmermann, Charité – Universitätsmedizin Berlin, und Prof. Tien Y. Wong, NUS

The partners in Berlin and Singapore employ world-leading researchers for deep learning methods in retinal imaging in vascular medicine (Singapore) and neurology (Berlin). In this seed project, as a legal and technical prerequisite for long-term collaboration, the researchers aim to create a platform that enables artificial intelligence-based analysis methods to be shared. In addition, there are plans to create an image repository for future projects.

Details about Health Innovation projects

Artificial intelligence for controlling medical micro-robots, Prof. Holger Stark, Technische Universität Berlin, und Assistant Prof. Lailai Zhu, NUS

Micro-robots for use in minimally invasive surgery, local administration of medication, and imaging represent a feasible vision in medicine. In such tasks, it is important to maneuver the micro-robots precisely to specific locations in the body. This can be done externally with the help of a control unit. However, this project is going down a different path: The researchers are using artificial intelligence methods that the micro-robot can use to learn how to steer itself to a specific location in the body.

Visualizing inner structures of chromosomes using molecular microscopy, Dr. Christoph Andreas Diebolder, Charité – Universitätsmedizin Berlin, und Associate Prof. Lu Gan, NUS

In this project, researchers at Charité's Cryo-EM Core Facility and the NUS working group led by Prof. Lu Gan are jointly studying the structure of human chromosomes. The special equipment at the facility, which only recently became operational on the campus in Berlin-Buch, enables the three-dimensional imaging of molecules within the cell at almost atomic resolution. The researchers hope to use these findings to gain new insights into the molecular mechanisms of aging and associated diseases.