About

Mission and Vision

The Centre for Smart Health aims to create healthcare innovations with technology, making positive impacts to practice and the quality of care. We conduct cross-disciplinary applied research that capitalizes on our expertise in technology, and translates the results into practice to improve healthcare education, diagnosis and treatment.

History and Backgrounds

The Centre was originated from the Centre for Telehealth and Telecare founded in 2002, under the Area of Strategic Development of the Hong Kong Polytechnic University and It was renamed as the Centre for Integrative Digital Health (CIDH) in 2006, and then as the present Centre for Smart Health (S.Health) in 2013. The current Centre Director is Prof. Thomas Choi.

Research

The Centre has been at the frontier of innovative healthcare innovations, such as health assessment kiosk series, mobile integrative health clinic, and virtual reality for healthcare and medicine, The current focus of the Centre for Smart Health is artificial intelligence for medicine and healthcare, mining both imaging (Dr. Harry Qin) and non-imaging data (Prof. Thomas Choi) for medical image analysis and predictive healthcare intelligence.

Outputs

The Center has a proven track records of attracting major research grants from highly competitive schemes, including General Research Fund, National Science Foundation China, Innovation Technology Fund, and the recent Theme-based Research Scheme. It has also obtained funding for research, teaching and community services. The Centre also publishes research papers extensively in major international journals and top conferences.

Research Highlights

News and Updates

	Prof. Thomas Choi was invited to give the talk “Identification of lower-limb movement intention with BCI and machine learning” at the 15th International Convention on Rehabilitation Engineering and Assistive Technology (i-CREATe) on 27 August 2022.
	Dr. Harry Qin, lead PolyU applicant in the joint project Institute of Medical Intelligence and XR, has successfully obtained funding from the RGC Theme-based Research Scheme 2022/2023. The total amount of the project is over HK$ 50 million, for a period of 5 years. The project is led by CUHK, with joint forces of CityU, HKU, HKUST and PolyU. The other PolyU co-PIs are Prof. David Shum (Dean FHSS) and Prof. Thomas Choi. (Source of photo: Singtao Daily)
	Prof. Thomas Choi participated in PolyU’s Junior Research Mentoring Programmme in May-August 2021. The programme aims to nurture a culture of research among secondary school students in Hong Kong. He coached students from the Saint Paul’s Secondary School, Good Hope School and TWGHs Wong Fut Nam College, let them gain understanding about his GRF-funded project “Intelligent Recognition of Movement Intention with Brain-Computer Interface for Lower-limb Rehabilitation” and provide hand-on experience on EEG data collection and analysis.
	Prof. Thomas gave the talk “Artificial Intelligence in Medicine and Healthcare” at the HealthTech Forum – HealthTech for Community at the Hong Kong Institute of Vocational Education (Kwai Chung campus) on 23 June 2020.
	Prof. Thomas Choi gave the talk “Health Care Promotion with Predictive Intelligence” at the Health and Medical AI Workshop on 19 Oct 2019 at the Hong Kong Science Park, which was a post-conference workshop of the Asia Pacific Electronic Health Records Conference 2019 (APEHRC 2019) .
	In the Asia Pacific Electronic Health Records Conference 2019 (APEHRC 2019) at the Hong Kong Science Park, Prof. Thomas Choi presented the preliminary results of the research “Prediction of Dementia Risk with Community Health Data using Machine Learning Approaches” on 18 Oct 2019.
	Dr. Thomas Choi presented the poster “Virtual Reality Wound Care Training for Clinical Nursing Education: An Initial User Study” at the 26th IEEE Conference on Virtual Reality and 3D User Interfaces, Osaka, Japan, 23-27 March 2019.
	Dr. Marek Matejak from the First Faculty of Medicine of the Charles University in Prague, Czech Repulbic, was invited by the Centre for Smart Health to give a talk on “eHealth Standards in Czech and FHIR” on 14 March 2019.
	Dr. Thomas Choi received a token of appreciation from the Tung Wah Group of Hospitals Elderly Services at their 2019 Annual Gathering on 26 February 2019, in recognition of his active participation in elderly community services.
	Dr. Thomas Choi was invited to give a talk Promoting Health Care with Predictive Intelligence at The Connected Cities Conference (Breakout Session 1: The Future of Healthcare and the Ageing Population in the GBA) at the Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Centre on 24 Jan 2019. The event was organized by KPMG, CLP, JOS, Siemens, Smart City Consortium and the Wilson Group.
	Dr. Guanjin Wang, Brenda, PhD student under the Centre for Smart Health with Dr. Thomas Choi as the chief supervisor, will receive the Faculty Distinguish Thesis Award in the 24th Congregation in recognition of her high quality PhD thesis: Health Care Predictive Analytics Using Artificial Intelligence Techniques. Dr. Wang has just completed a joint PhD programme. She will obtain both a PhD in Nursing (PolyU) and a PhD in Software (University Technology Sydney).
	The Research Laboratory of the Centre for Smart Health was opened for the Info Day on 6 Oct 2018. 713 visits were recorded on that day.
	The Nursing Association of China’s Cross-Straits Medicine Exchange Association was established in 21 Sep 2018. Dr. Thomas Choi was nominated and elected as a member of the Association. He was also invited to give a talk on “Data Mining in Nursing”, at the First Forum on Nursing Development of Cross-Straits, Hong Kong and Macau, Beijing 20-22 Sep 2018, organized by the Association.
	Dr. Thomas Choi attended the 14th Global Conference on Ageing of the International Federation on Ageing at Toronto, 8-10 August 2018, and presented two papers: Promoting health literacy to elderly people through video conferencing, and Elders’ acceptance of salivary glucose test as a diabetes monitoring approach.
	Dr. Thomas Choi presented the poster “Acquisition and Classification of Haptic P300 Signals for Brain-Computer Interface” at the Brain-Computer Interface Meeting 2018 (BCI2018), Asilomar, Pacific Grove, California, USA, 21-15 May, 2018.
	Dr. Thomas Choi received the National Natural Science Award 2017 for achievements in artificial intelligence with the project “Clustering, Knowledge Leveraging and Learning in Neuro-Fuzzy System Model Construction”, Second-class Award, by the Ministry of Education, People’s Republic of China, on 14 April 2018.
	Dr. Thomas Choi presented two papers at the 19th IEEE International Symposium on Multimedia at Taipei, Taiwan, 11-13 December, 2017 – “Enhancing the Performance of Brain-Computer Interface with Haptics” and “Towards Interactive and Realistic Rendering of 3D Fetal Ultrasound via Photon Mapping”.
	Dr. Thomas Choi gave a tutorial on “New Approaches for BCI Signal Processing” at the 24th International Conference on Neural Information Processing at Guangzhou, China, November 14-18, 2017.
	A group of overseas students studying occupational therapy and physical therapy visited the Centre for Smart Health on 5 July 2017.
	The Centre for Smart Health was present at the 2017 Gerontech and Innovation Expo cum Summit (GIES), 16-18 June 2017, to demonstrate innovations that can be used for elderly people. Teresa Tsien (left), Professor of Practice in Gerontology, APSS, visited our booth.
	The Medicine and Biology Subgroup of the Hong Kong Research Grants Council visited the Centre for Smart Health on 15 June 2017.
	The Centre for Smart Health showcased the virtual reality based simulator for learning nasogastric tube placement at the Hong Kong International Medical Devices and Supplies -Fair 2017 at the Hong Kong, 16-18 May, 2017, Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Centre.