The Center for Health and Technology (CHAT) is a multidisciplinary interfaculty institute of the University of Antwerp that aims to promote, stimulate and facilitate innovation and entrepreneurship in healthcare by finding the best solutions for health problems through technology use and innovation. CHAT strives to fulfill a role as accelerator, incubator and network for healthcare technology, bringing together people, technology and resources CHAT includes academics, students, health professionals, engineers, product developers, economists, legal advisors, entrepreneurs and investors passionate about improving health through technology.

CHAT starts from a problem-based approach and uses interdisciplinary collaboration to help develop and validate innovative technology or processes that has the potential to improve health and patient care.

In addition, with the exponential augmentation of computational and storage capacity, tele-monitoring and digitalization are now possible and applicable in many domains of health: sports, occupational therapy, physiotherapy, medicine, …

Datamining and artificial intelligence are necessary to handle the big data and optimize the design, development of new products, processes and therapies in health. Also, ethical, security and privacy issues, General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) have to be tackled.

Therefore, in the University of Antwerp, we join our forces, expertise in this center to take a lead and make the innovations with an interdisciplinary cooperation possible.