On October 14th, OnePlanet’s General Manager – Chris van Hoof –  talked at #ITFhealth2020 about the vast potential of new, precision technologies and tools such as a “smart bathroom”, an “ingestible sensor” or a “human digital twin” – and the large impact they can have on our nutrition and overall health & wellbeing.

We have just One Planet. Yet we have been depleting resources faster than we replenish them: we are at the moment using 1.6 earths. This is not sustainable. And it is not just resources we are depleting. Our changing demographics are going to add 1 billion extra people to this planet in a decade; making the problem even more severe. 
This demographic change also translates into 300 million additional over-65-year-olds. This will increase the chronic disease burden. To keep our healthcare sustainable, there is an absolute need for value-based healthcare. Biopharma raises early detection and prevention and digital therapeutics as some of the big knobs and handles to solve this. 

This is exactly why OnePlanet Research Center was initiated. In a partnership. imec, Wageningen University and Research, Radboud University and Radboudumc address these vast global challenges – related to nutrition, health, and sustainability. At OnePlanet we are convinced that our technology innovations can deliver the necessary breakthroughs. 


But what technologies and which breakthroughs?

Chris van Hoof explains:

“10 years after fitness trackers and five years after smartwatches started a boom of consumer health monitoring, the combination of improved device performance and improving analytics has led to growing impact in the domain of cardiovascular health.

To make a difference regarding health in a broader sense, new monitoring techniques are needed in order to provide new biomarkers for diagnosis and/or prevention on which analytics can be built. In the OnePlanet programs, new sensors, markers and analytics are being created for application in the field of gastrointestinal health. We also aim to unravel the link between nutrition and health (including mental wellbeing). Technology innovations needed for capturing diverse metabolites and markers reflecting health/disease, and our progress on ingestible sensors and towards a bathroom for health monitoring will be presented.”

Looking for breakthrough applications? Technology an digital innovations at OnePlanet can help you get there!