Organized by Swiss Digital Health, with The Ark Foundation and the HES-SO Valais-Wallis as main partners, Digital Health Connect, the must-attend event in the field of health and digital technology, will offer you this year the opportunity to live the experience either on-site or virtually. A unique event allowing you to discover new and topical content in the field. The theme of remote health will be in the spotlight during this 9th edition, which will bring together renowned national and international speakers. Among them, Katarzyna Wac, director of the Quality-of-Life Technologies laboratory at the University of Geneva. She will give a conference on “Remote quality of life assessment: “What always speaks in silence is the body””. Discover the activities of the QoLife Technologies Lab and the portrait of its director, Katarzyna Wac.
Data science at the service of quality of life
The primary objective of the QoL Technologies Lab is to promote information and communication technologies to improve the quality of life of individuals through challenging, high-impact, interdisciplinary research, education, science communication, and outreach. In particular, its goal is to establish quality research in mobile network systems providing accurate and timely services to their users.
The overall approach is transdisciplinary, as many challenges in the development and deployment phases of these systems need to be addressed by considering not only the system and its quality of service in an operational networking environment, but also the end-users of the system, who approach mobile networking from the point of view of new innovative methods to achieve a predefined goal. Through transdisciplinary research projects, the QoL team aims to establish innovative methodologies to demonstrate the value of mobile networking systems improving the quality of service, quality of experience and ultimately the quality of life of their end users and society at large.
The QoL team is currently contributing to research on mobile computing and communications applied to mobile healthcare solutions (i.e., digital health) for wellness, disease self-management, active and healthy aging, and assisted living at home.
The Quality of Life Technologies Research Lab was established in 2010 by Professor Katarzyna Wac and is part of the Service Science Institute (SSI) and the Center for Informatics (CUI) at the University of Geneva, Switzerland (UniGe). Since 2015, he is part of the Department of Computer Science (DIKU) at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark. In addition, some studies in the QoL lab are conducted at Stanford University and Stanford Medicine.
Prof. Katarzyna Wac as head of the QoLife Technologies Lab
Prof. Katarzyna Wac leads the Quality of Life Technologies (QoL) research area, affiliated with the Geneva School of Economics (GSEM), the Center for Informatics at the University of Geneva (CUI, Switzerland) and, since 2015 – also at the Department of Informatics (DIKU) at the University of Copenhagen (Denmark). From 2013 to 2020, she was also affiliated with the Stanford University School of Medicine (MED). She holds a BSc and MSc in Computer Science (2003) from Wroclaw University of Technology (WUT, Poland), an MSc in Telematics (2004) from the University of Twente (UT, The Netherlands), and a PhD in Information Systems (2009) from the University of Geneva (UNIGE, Switzerland).
Prof. Wac’s research interests revolve around fundamental and algorithmic problems, as well as human-centered challenges of systems that enable assessment and improvement of human behavior, health and quality of life in the long term.
Read the article about the DHC’s special guest, Kaiser Permanente: Breaking News – Discover our special guest: Kaiser Permanente! – Swiss Digital Health