Mahla Poudineh, University of Waterloo

Mahla Poudineh is an Assistant Professor at the University of Waterloo, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering and the founding director of IDEATION Lab (Integrated Devices for Early disease Awareness and Translational applicatIONs Laboratory) since January 2020. Poudineh received her Ph.D. degree in Electrical Engineering from the University of Toronto in 2017. Prior to joining Waterloo, she completed postdoctoral training at the University of Toronto and Stanford University, School of Medicine in 2018 and 2019, respectively. During 2023-2024, she visited MIT on a six-month sabbatical leave, hosted by Prof. Robert Langer. Her research interests include developing new technologies for diagnostic and therapeutic purposes, continuous health monitoring and translating biomedical devices to the clinic and market. Her research has been selected as Science Translational Medicine Editor’s choice article and highlighted in the Nature News&Views. She was the recipient of Waterloo Faculty of Engineering Research Excellence Award, Ontario Early Researcher Award, and the Johnson & Johnson WiSTEM2D Scholars Award (Technology Category).

Advanced Sensing Technologies for Healthcare Automation

The absence of an automated healthcare stems from the current system's reliance on doctor visits and delayed test results. The long-term vision of my lab is to take steps towards making healthcare more automated. This involves establishing sensors that continuously monitor the health status of patients and advanced control algorithms that process this real-time data for triggering the drug delivery. To reach this goal, we are developing advanced sensors for health monitoring and better disease understanding, with the ultimate goal of creating a closed-loop platform for healthcare automation. Our advancements introduce a new generation of polymeric wearable systems for minimally invasive monitoring and treatment in outpatient settings. We also develop technologies that enable continuous, real-time tracking of clinically important biomarkers, an urgent need that cannot be accomplished using gold standard techniques. The new advances reported in this talk, enrich the level of information that can be collected from different body fluids, introducing novel diagnostic and monitoring tools for diverse diseases, signifying the first steps towards a more automated healthcare.