THE UBORA PROJECT: Euro-African Open Biomedical Engineering e-Platform for Innovation through Education

The EU funded UBORA project aims at creating an e-Infrastructure, UBORA, for open source co-design of new solutions to face the current and future healthcare challenges of Europe and Africa, by exploiting networking, knowledge on rapid prototyping of new ideas and sharing of safety criteria and performance data. The e-Infrastructure is being implemented to foster advances in education and the development of innovative solutions in Biomedical Engineering, both of which are flywheels for emerging and developed economies. Through the UBORA e-Infrastructure, the biomedical community can generate and share open data and blueprints of biomedical devices, accompanied by the required procedures for respecting quality assurance, and assessing performance and safety. When properly implemented, as guaranteed by authorized Notified Bodies, these biomedical devices can safely be used in hospitals and on patients. UBORA (“excellence” in Swahili) brings together European and African Universities and their associated technological hubs (supporting biomedical prototyping laboratories and incubators), national and international policymakers and committed and credible stakeholders propelled by a series of summer schools and competitions. The teaching-learning experiences within the UBORA project, represented by summer schools and competitions, are being implemented on the basis of the CDIO (conceivedesign-implement-operate) principles linking European and African students sharing the complete development process of innovative medical devices for global health concerns. Such collaborative open design teaching-learning experiences are expected to promote and rethink Biomedical Engineering Education across Europe, Africa and throughout the globe, while also serving as main initial input for making the UBORA e-Infrastructure become a key resource for the future of personalized and universal healthcare. In this study we present the overall strategy and the initial steps of the UBORA e-Infrastructure and related CDIO experiences. “This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 731053”.