The IEEE EMBS Student Mentoring Program (SMP) 2024 is one of the most remarkable programs within the IEEE EMBS Student Activities Committee (SAC). The program was revamped in 2021 with the aims of creating mentoring partnerships between EMBS student members and its professionals and promoting the skills and professional development of students and young professionals in society. After successfully launching for three consecutive years, the SMP 2024 edition involved more participants than the previous editions, with 88 mentee-mentor pairs and 16 appointed ambassadors. As a global program, the 2024 edition involved all 10 IEEE regions, with mentees and mentors coming from 35 and 28 countries, respectively. The program enriches society by producing excellent mentees who receive academic and professional guidance from experienced mentors. According to the program outcomes, mentees report improved academic and leadership skills, as well as personal and professional development. Some mentees grasped opportunities in the program to launch biomedical engineering (BME) projects with their mentors and to join and present at prestigious international conferences. In addition, the post-program survey results show participants’ high interest in the upcoming editions. Thus, alongside mentees’ notable achievements, this article highlights how the SMP 2024 edition empowers society through mentorship.
Florida Atlantic University has established a new Department of Biomedical Engineering (BME) to educate a diverse workforce at the intersection of engineering, medicine, biology, and artificial intelligence. This article introduces the department’s educational vision, curriculum, and state-of-the-art laboratories designed to support experiential learning and clinical translation. By embedding AI throughout undergraduate and graduate tracks, the program provides students with practical, cross-disciplinary research opportunities. Additionally, the article highlights the department’s primary research centers, illustrating how active collaborations among engineering, medicine, and industry advance biomedical discovery and healthcare technologies to address emerging global health challenges.
A surgical tracking system, called vision-integrated surgical tracking assistance (VISTA), is being developed to use neural radiance fields (NeRFs) to take the current pre-operative computed tomography (CT) scan and video from the surgeon’s 2-D endoscope and generate a quickly updated, 3-D view of the sinus surgery field as the surgeon removes tissue. The goal is to make standard sinus surgery procedures more precise and effective, and reduce the need for follow-up surgeries.
Current allergy treatments manage symptoms but rarely address the underlying immune response. This article explores how nanoparticle and mRNA-based therapies could retrain the immune system to tolerate allergens safely and precisely. While early research shows promising results, significant clinical testing and development are still needed before these therapies reach patients.
Airway disease management is undergoing a structural transformation. For decades, asthma was treated as a single condition with a stepwise escalation of inhaled therapies, an approach that left the most severe cases cycling through treatments misaligned with their underlying biology. Updated global guidelines from the Global Initiative for Asthma (GINA) and ARIA-EAACI have shifted the field toward precision, biomarker-guided care. Central to this shift is the formal recognition of clinical remission as an achievable treatment goal, with real-world registry data now reporting on-treatment remission rates of 22%-34% across severe asthma populations on biologics. The united airway concept, linking allergic rhinitis, chronic rhinosinusitis, and asthma through shared T2 mechanisms, is reinforced by new evidence but remains fragmented in clinical practice. Meanwhile, environmental pressures including climate-driven allergen changes and air pollution are widening the gap between scientific capability and patient access, particularly in low- and middle-income settings. This article proposes the airway integration readiness (AIR) framework as a conceptual tool for evaluating how effectively care systems connect phenotype-guided therapy, cross-specialty airway co-management, and longitudinal remission tracking. It synthesizes the current evidence base, tracing how asthma and allergic airway disease are being redefined from episodic symptom management toward integrated, remission-oriented care, and identifies the translational challenges that remain.
The 2025-2026 conference season in respiratory and allergy medicine has surfaced signals that the field is shifting faster than many clinical systems can absorb. The agendas converge on themes that were peripheral a decade ago: precision phenotyping, remission as a treatment target, the united airway as a clinical organizing principle, metabolic-inflammatory crossover, and the environmental forces reshaping disease burden in real time. This article traces those signals through emerging conference data, updated guidelines from GINA and ARIA-EAACI, and the growing evidence that climate-driven pollen shifts and access disparities are widening the gap between what the science now offers and what patients receive. It extends the analysis to environmental burden, emerging therapeutic signals, and translational challenges that define airway disease, with attention to the engineering infrastructure, including health digital twins and cross-specialty decision support, needed to close the gap between scientific capability and patient care.
Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease inhibits breathing through chronic inflammation, excessive mucus buildup, and destruction of lung tissue. Current treatments cannot reverse the disease. Scientists are using minimally invasive ablation therapies that target cells and nerves to offer promising new avenues to improve respiratory function.
A vibrating headband, called SONU, and developed by the startup SoundHealth, applies personalized acoustic resonance therapy to treat symptoms of rhinitis. In late 2025, the company rolled out a separate headband to promote sleep.
In this IEEE Pulse Industry Corner Live interview, Editor-in-Chief Chad Andresen speaks with Ronja Muller-Bruhn, CEO and Founder of STIMIT, about the company’s non-invasive transcutaneous magnetic phrenic nerve stimulation system for ICU patients. Surface coils applied to the neck activate the diaphragm in sedated or comatose patients, targeting prevention of ventilator-induced diaphragm dysfunction—a condition causing up to 50% loss of respiratory muscle function within days of mechanical ventilation onset. With Health Canada clearance secured and a U.S. FDA De Novo pivotal trial underway, STIMIT aims to fundamentally shift ICU ventilation paradigms toward active preservation of natural respiratory neuromuscular physiology.
Allergies can rule a person’s life, but fortunately advice on how to prevent and manage them is always evolving, in no small part due to groundbreaking research from the U.K. Jim Banks looks at the U.K.’s new National Allergy Strategy and why some of the leading experts behind it are calling for a paradigm shift in the cultural awareness of allergy risk.
New technologies developed by a California company are expanding upon raw coronary computed tomography angiography (CCTA) data with artificial intelligence (AI) and computational fluid dynamics to model the coronary arteries and identify arterial narrowing and the types of plaque present. An integrated, AI-driven planning tool also helps interventional cardiologists optimize stent placement.
New technology by HeartSciences Inc. is using signal processing and a cloud platform driven by artificial intelligence to gather frequency and energy data in electrocardiogram signals; retrieve information beyond visible in a standard ECG; and identify early signs of heart disease in an easy-to-read format. The technology includes the MyoVista Insights platform and the MyoVista wavECG device.
Artificial hearts advance toward fully implantable, permanent replacements for donors.
Drug-induced QT prolongation is the leading cause of FDA nonapproval and a key safety concern for many medications, including cardiac drugs, antibiotics, psychotropic drugs, and oncology treatments. Conventional automated QT algorithms have shown variable reliability in recordings with abnormal or irregular morphology, with misclassification rates up to 75%. This article presents SafeBeat Rx, an AI-powered ECG platform that provides beat-by-beat ECG analysis, enabling full transparency and optional adjustment of measurements for each individual ECG heartbeat. Validated against expert cardiologist adjudication, SafeBeat addresses a critical gap in postdischarge cardiac surveillance and represents a novel approach to guideline-adherent pharmacological disease management.
New technologies developed by a California company are expanding upon raw coronary computed tomography angiography (CCTA) data with artificial intelligence (AI) and computational fluid dynamics to model the coronary arteries and identify arterial narrowing and the types of plaque present. An integrated, AI-driven planning tool also helps interventional cardiologists optimize stent placement.
A new generation of noninvasive, FDA-cleared devices is making continuous heart monitoring more accessible to address cardiovascular disease. As healthcare shifts toward outcomes-based models, these technologies promise more proactive, equitable monitoring and care, though challenges around ease of usability and clinician trust persist.
Researchers at Stanford University are midway through a five-year US ${\$}$ 26.4 million "moonshot" project to develop the foundational technologies needed to bioprint new hearts using patients' own cells. Collaborators from 15 Stanford labs-including bioengineers, computational experts, electrical and mechanical engineers, surgeons, biologists, stem cell researchers, and developmental biologists-are working toward transplanting a manufactured heart into a pig by 2028. They must clear numerous hurdles to create a living, beating heart from scratch. So far, they have managed to increase stem cell production to "organ scale" and have developed a novel new technology for printing tissues and their vascular structures within a semi-solid gel. They are now puzzling out how to resolve issues with supporting that bioprinted tissue through synthesized vascular trees. The team recently finished developing a novel 3-D printer that can make tissue as complex as a heart fast enough that the cells will survive the printing process long enough to be connected to support structures to keep the resulting organ alive.
This article examines the growing role of robotics in the cardiac catheterization laboratory as interventional cardiology moves toward more complex coronary and structural heart procedures. Robotic systems improve precision through motion scaling and tremor reduction while reducing operator fatigue and cumulative radiation exposure. The article argues that successful adoption depends not only on mechanical accuracy, but also on workflow integration, human-machine collaboration, safety design, regulatory readiness, and financial viability. It highlights the challenges of fitting robotic platforms into fast-paced cath lab environments where setup time, team coordination, and rapid conversion to manual control are critical. The discussion also explores remote robotic intervention to distribute specialist expertise across sites with limited staffing depth. Finally, the article considers how artificial intelligence, computer vision, and predictive analytics may extend robotic platforms from assistive tools into more intelligent systems that support safer, more scalable, and more accessible cardiovascular care.
