With the start of our 2016/17 session now underway, I’d like to take a moment to welcome our new Chair, Dr Daniel Abasolo. Daniel has been volunteering with the Healthcare Technologies Network (HTN) for a few years now and, having been Vice Chair for the past 3 years is now taking on the Chair position from Dr Peter Bannister. I’m sure you will all join me in thanking Peter for all his fantastic work as Chair over the past three years and also in giving Daniel a warm welcome to the role!


So, what else have I been up to over the past few weeks?


Well, I attended the second day of 2nd IET Conference on Technologies for Active and Assitive Living on 25 October. This two day conference was held by the Vision and Imaging (V&I) Network but had a strong healthcare overlap with the subject matter being Active and Assisted Living. It was a fascinating day and with our shared focus on healthcare, perhaps we will see if V&I and the HTN can collaborate on an event in the future.


The 22 November was a busy day for the HTN as we held our first Executive meeting of the session. We were also joined by our Technical Advisory Panel (TAP) later on in the day. As usual, it was a very productive meeting with lots of event and project ideas being discussed. We reviewed our activity plan for the upcoming session and noted that it could have more of a focus on industry. We are currently thinking of ways we can strengthen this side of things so if you have any thoughts please let us know!


Following on from the Exec meeting we held our Annual Healthcare Lecture 2016. With around 84 people in attendance the venue was buzzing and it was great to see some fantastic networking taking place. The event began with a couple of short presentations from our two Healthcare Technologies Student and Early Career Award winners. William Hawkes, winner of the IET Dennis Hill award and Samantha Simons, winner of the IET William James award gave fascinating talks on their research. We also announced that our Call for Entries for the 2017 Awards is now open. Please help us spread the word!


Our keynote speaker of the evening was Chris Lewis from Lewis Insight. Chris spoke on ‘When the hyper-connected individual meets the Healthcare Sector’ and judging by the number of questions which followed he clearly piqued everyone’s interest.


If you missed out on this lecture you'll be pleased to know that the event was filmed and is now available to view on IET.tv.You might also be interested to read some of the online activity which took place during the event or view some of the photos. 


Which leads me to remind you all to follow us on Twitter @IETHealthTech! You can keep up to date with the latest news and announcements from the HTN there as well as seeing live tweets from our events.


And we would like to hear from you too! Get involved with the network and let us know what you would like to see from the HTN here.