The City of Granada held its final of three webinars on the opportunities of blockchain innovations for cities. Today’s focus was on Biotech, eHealth & Medical Solutions, and involved more than 25 experts from Europe and China. The webinar was part of Granada’s pilot project awarded with the IUC Competitive Fund.
Today’s webinar was opened with words from IUC Asia Raul Daussa (session moderator) and Pablo Gándara, who provided few examples of city-to-city exchanges on biotechnology with Guangzhou’s GDD (Biotech Island) and with Granada.
Ana Agudo (General Director) and María Ogáyar (Innovation Coordinator) of Health Technology Park (PTS Granada) provided welcoming remarks, discussing how blockchain technologies can be used in biotech and medtech industries. “The PTS Granada comprises 25 buildings in operation hosting 109 companies and institutions, which employ 6.300 workers (30% of which are dedicated to R&D)” – she said.
James HUANG, Ph.D. Co-Founder/CTO of DataInsights in Guangzhou, China explained how AI and blockchain can be instrumental in delivering distributed healthcare as a service (DHCaaS) in adding an extra dimension to elderly healthcare, utilizing big data and predictive analytics.
IUC expert Oscar Prat moderated the second session, a roundtable covering the topic of pilot or research projects from pilot cities – eHealth solutions, patient centric solutions, health records, pharmacology traceability, biotech developments, IA & Medicine. Cities invited to present were: Rome, Granada, Shenzhen and Shanghai. The CTO of Healthia (Smart CityLab of Rome & Lazio) Bernardo Puccetti led off with their solutions for the Internet of Medical Things, using cutting-edge medical algorithms to produce computer applications that become “health bubbles.” Yuan Li founder & CEO of Health Chain Data from Shenzhen, explained how data intelligence can be used to provide personalized health solutions, to achieve personal life-long health management, via ai cloud service. Pablo Caballero, VP of Planetic then showed how its Spanish technology platform is used for the adoption & promotion of digital technologies, served through its app (vitahealth.app), offering personal health advice. Michael Chunming Wang—Dir. of Collaboration Dev. Dept. at Renji Hospital, Shanghai Jiaotong Univ., School of Medicine—elaborated blockchain‘s potential in medical services for data validation, epidemic prevention and international accreditation.
Providing a summary of today’s webinar, Francisco Benítez (Coordinator, Blockchain Webinar Series on behalf of Granada) expressed his thanks and urged attendees to continue the cooperation (block lab) between cities from the EU & China through the bilateral platform to be elaborated by Granada City by the end of 2020.
Closing words were delivered by Francisco Aranda (Granada City Hall, Director of Economy and Smart City), expressing his thanks to the IUC Asia team for their work in putting together and coordinating today’s webinar, looking forward to continued cooperation on blockchain for the healthcare industry, especially with biotech & medtech solutions.
Background
The City of Granada was granted the competitive award of the IUC Asia project. The activities selected include:
- Organising three webinars on blockchain technology’s application to: smart city, circular economy and biotechnology
- Covering the implementation of these webinars through a video showcasing possible projects
- Elaborating a bilingual (EN/CN) online platform to support the development of future joint projects on blockchain, involving the cities, research centers and companies participating in the webinars (who are pilot cities of the IUC programme).
The webinar series presents the main opportunities and challenges that blockchain technology represents for cities. The webinars debate how to cooperate to find common solutions through the exchange of information or joint research projects. The series shows the current international blockchain for cities framework and state-of-the-art solutions in the participating cities.
