Robert Istepanian is a visiting professor at the Institute of Global Health Innovation, Imperial College, London. He is recognized as one of the leading authorities and pioneers of mobile healthcare and the first scientist to have coined and defined the concept of ‘m-Health’. He is a WHO expert advisor on their Guideline Development Group ( GDG) for digital health interventions.
He holds a Ph.D. in Electronic and Electrical Engineering from Loughborough University, UK, and he has since held several academic and research posts in the UK and Canada. These included visiting academic and professor in the Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Imperial College, London; professor of Data Communications for Healthcare and founding Director of the Medical Information and Network Technologies Research Centre (MINT) at Kingston University, London; senior lectureships in the universities of Portsmouth and Brunel University, UK; and associate professor at Ryerson University, Toronto with adjunct professorship at the University of West Ontario, Canada. He has also held a visiting professorship at St. George’s Medical School, University of London, and was the Leverhulme ‘Distinguished visiting fellow at the Centre for Global e-Health Innovation, University of Toronto.
Professor Istepanian was awarded the 2009 IEEE award for the best and most cited paper by the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society for his seminal work on mobile health (m-Health) published in 2004. He was also the recipient of the IEE Heaviside Award in 1999 from the Institution of Electrical Engineering, UK. He has led numerous funded multi-disciplinary research projects on m-Health, e-Health and telehealth, funded by the UK Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council, the European Commission, the British Council, the Royal Society, the Royal Academy of Engineering, and the Leverhulme Trust, in addition to sponsored projects and clinical trials funded by global telecom and mobile industries. He has served as the Vice-Chair of the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) focus group on standardization of machine-to-machine (M2M).
Professor Istepanian previously served as an expert on numerous assessment and peer evaluation panels on healthcare technology innovations, well-being, m-Health and e-Health funding. These included the Dutch-Philips partnership program on ‘Healthy Life Style’ , the Science Foundation Ireland Strategic Research Cluster Grants program, the Finnish Strategic Centers of Science, Technology and Innovation, and the Canada Foundation for Innovation. In addition, he has been peer reviewer for the following UK Funding bodies: EPSRC, BBSRC, Wellcome Trust, Department of Health, Service Delivery Organisation, Health Innovation Challenge Fund, National Institute of Health Research, BUPA Foundation, and Diabetes – UK. Further, he has served on the editorial board of IEEE Transaction on Information Technology in Biomedicine, IEEE Transactions on NanoBioScience, IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing, International Journal of Telemedicine and Applications, Journal of Mobile Multimedia, and Journal of World Medical & Health Policy and as guest editor for the first two of these journals.
Professor Istepanian has served on numerous IEEE committees and chaired organising and technical committees of national and international conferences in the United Kingdom, the United States and elsewhere, including the Telemed Conferences at the Royal Society of Medicine, London, the IET, London, the 2000 World Medical Congress, Chicago, and the successive IEEE-Engineering in Medicine and Biology International Annual Conferences (IEEE-EMBS). He has been invited to present numerous keynote lectures at international conferences and meetings in the UK, Europe, USA, Canada and other countries. His publications exceed 200 peer-reviewed papers and books on mobile communications for healthcare, m-Health, control systems and biomedical signal processing. His recent book on mobile health ( m-Health) is considered a leading reference and text book on this topic.