La Salle-URL works on research projects to improve quality of life and support in the diagnosis of diseases

La Salle-URL

La Salle Campus Barcelona, the founder member of the Universitat Ramon Llull, is a university centre that wagers on talent, research, innovation and enterprise in all of its areas of knowledge. With respect to research, La Salle-URL focuses its efforts on applied research that can benefit society in the short and mid-term. One of its differential factors is its work in multidisciplinary teams of qualified, creative researchers strongly motivated to confront the challenges facing society.

La Salle Campus Barcelona currently has six research groups recognised by the Government of Catalonia: GREITM (Enterprise, Innovation and Technology Management), IAR (Integrated Architecure Research), GRITS (Internet Technologies and Storage), GRSETAD (Electronic Systems, Telecommunication and Data Analysis), GRETEL (Technology Enhanced Learning) and GTM (Media Technologies).

Projects and technological solutions

In the area of care and health applications, La Salle-URL has carried out a large number of projects in order to improve people’s quality of life, and aimed at developing new tools to facilitate the diagnosis of certain diseases. 

In the area of health, work is under way on developing service-oriented technological solutions drawing on the multidisciplinary knowledge of the research groups of the campus. Specifically, projects have been carried out around care and therapeutic robotics with the Hospital Sant Joan de Déu (TV3’s La Marató project); projects intended to give support to decision-making in the diagnosis of diseases such as breast cancer with the Hospital Universitari de Girona (HIRMAC project), melanomas with the Hospital Clínic de Barcelona (MID-CBR project), and early diagnosis of Alzheimer’s disease in collaboration with the IRIT in Tolosa (IMMED project); the design and development of serious games for the treatment of phobias via enhanced reality, in conjunction with the Blanquerna Faculty of Psychology, Education and Sport Sciences (Arachnophobia project), or for improving children’s food habits with the St. Jude Children’s Research Hospitality (Yummy Tricks and Glooveth, winners of the Gold and Silver Awards of the Cure4Kids Global eHealth Challenge in 2010), or patient rehabilitation from home, using technologies like Kinect along with the company Labsid S.L.; the study of usability and user experience as part of the European CONTRAST project on the rehabilitation of stroke patients; and in other areas related to logistics, developing electronic solutions for improving store management by pharmaceutical companies, amongst other things.

Of these projects, we must mention the long-standing collaboration with the Hospital Sant Joan de Déu in Barcelona, where for many years a robotic care project has been carried out with sick children, in which social robots such as the PLEO dinosaur are used therapeutically to reduce levels of anxiety during their hospitalisation and to enhance their response to treatment. Robotics is also applied to children with autism, with some kind of disability or with brain injuries, and their response in their interaction with these social robots is studied in order to improve their quality of life.

On the level of applications, La Salle-URL has given support in developing solutions like the Foodlinker project which allows people with allergies or intolerances to know whether a certain food is suitable for them; or tools based on image processing to analyse the result of genetic changes in plant roots by the CSIC Centre for Agrogenomic Regulation (CRAG), and tools based on audio processing for developing traffic noise maps to improve citizens’ quality of life within the European DYNAMAP project, adapting the technology developed by the IMMED project.

From a more long-term research viewpoint, we must highlight the European EUNISON project which has investigated the possibility of numerically simulating the process of human voice generation on the Future Emerging Technologies (FET-Open) project. Being capable of precisely simulating the operation of the voice organ, from the muscular activation to the final sound produced, in the future will allow the effects of possible pathologies of the vocal cords to be foreseen, new tools to be had to assist the work of speech therapists and the voice of a certain individual to be reproduced. Today, also on the European level, La Salle-URL is part of the “European Innovation Partnership on Active and Healthy Ageing” in the section of Ambient Assisted Living technology standardisation.

Training

La Salle-URL enhances the whole of this area of action not only via projects of research and knowledge transfer, but also by favouring the creation of new companies in this sector through the La Salle Technova Barcelona, the Salle Campus Barcelona innovation park. La Salle-URL also trains people with capacity to lead the introduction of information technologies in health management to achieve greater effectiveness, efficiency and quality care through the Master’s Degree in eHealth.