With an aim to promote and foster cutting edge technologies in the multi-disciplinary areas of medical electronics, the Biotechnology Industry Research Assistance Council (BIRAC) in partnership with the Department of Electronics and Information Technology (DeitY) has launched Industry Innovation Programme on Medical Electronics (IIPME).
The focus of the programme will be on technologies for chronic diseases; convergence of medical device and bioinformatics; increasing the outreach through medical electronics; and imaging and navigation. The programme aims to encourage development of innovative solutions that can make the technology available and bring significant changes in the medical electronics ecosystem.
Under this programme, BIRAC has invited proposals from innovators, start-ups, SMEs and large Indian companies individually or in partnership or consortia mode for medical technologies ranging from hand-held point of care devices to large equipments, wearable gadgets to outreach devices, and from health tracking devices to RADAR technology based ultrasound machines.
Medical electronics is a branch of electronics that deals with design, implementation and use of electrical devices and equipment for medical purposes such as research, examination, diagnosis, treatment, assistance and care. Medical electronics utilizes field disciplines of both electronics and biomedical. Portable biomedical electronic devices are essential to move medical products from the hospital atmosphere to home, and to move medical examination from the laboratory and offer one- touch access to users. These devices offer secure access and enable both patients and doctors to stay in touch with each other remotely. The IIPME will be one of its kinds, which will directly target the innovations in the medical electronics start-ups, SMEs and large enterprises and will also help in generating the ideas to keep ready the pipeline of new unmet medical innovations.
The three main pillars of the programme are to support cutting edge technologies in multi-disciplinary areas of medical electronics; to address the challenges of R&D in medical electronics and develop the conducive ecosystem; and to foster and promote the research in medical electronics to make it available, accessible and affordable.
The programme will promote the scientific and technological research in Medical Electronics sector so as to make innovative medical electronics available, accessible and affordable to the people at the bottom of the pyramid.