The project aims at creating an EU-Africa e-Infrastructure, UBORA, for open source co-design of new solutions to face the current and future healthcare challenges of both continents, by exploiting networking, knowledge on rapid prototyping of new ideas and sharing of safety criteria and performance data. The e-Infrastructure will foster advances in education and the development of innovative solutions in Biomedical Engineering (BME), both of which are flywheels for European and African economies. It is conceived as a virtual platform for generating, exchanging, improving and implementing creative ideas in BME underpinned by a solid safety assessment framework founded on European medical device directives.
UBORA (“excellence” in Swahili) brings together European and African Universities and their associated technological hubs, national and international policymakers and committed and credible stakeholders propelled by a series of Design Schools and Competitions.
Specific objectives are:
• to create UBORA, a web-based platform for co-design and sharing data and blueprints of biomedical devices after vetting by trained biomedical engineers;
• to generate and upload a complete set of open access projects, data on performance and safety, and designs of biomedical devices to the platform;
• to empower innovations in healthcare, sustained by a solid academic background in BME.
Final Period: Conclusions of the action
The main output of the project is the UBORA e-platform and its established community of users. These users from different countries have benefited from the design competitions, the schools and the resources available in UBORA to build expertise and know-how in safe medical device design. They have the capacity to propel the vision of health equity through the open source paradigm using UBORA as a resource. The impact and potential of UBORA and the depth and breadth of work done can only be truly appreciated by visiting the e-platform as a user and interacting with other users and mentors. Therefore, we encourage readers of this summary to discover and interact with the UBORA community online (
https://platform.ubora-biomedical.org/(opens in new window)).
UBORA has a solid basis for its future management and exploitation as an educational and design platform. In particular a new Teaching/Learning methodology developed in the project based on the CDIO educational model empowered by a strong focus on Clinical Needs Identification, standards and regulatory compliance.
Finally, ten Open Source Medical Devices (OSMDs) have been developed by the consortium partners. The devices come complete with pre-production documentation, in a format ready for streamlined scaling up to manufacture as certified devices following the fabrication guidelines. Projects range from assistive technologies, devices for emergency situations, to devices for monitoring, for prevention and sanitation. These projects provide reliable solutions to well-identified clinical needs, exploiting conventional and advanced materials and both traditional and new production processes.
