Summer School: Emerging Technologies to Support Health Care and Independent Living, a Successful Learning Model for Latin America

The summer school is an international high-level academic training program that addresses the need to educate new generations in the design, use, and adaptation of emerging technologies for the social inclusion of the current elderly population in our countries, promoting their autonomy and healthy aging. It was established in 2017 at Pontificia Universidad Javeriana in Bogota, Colombia, in collaboration with IFMBE, CORAL, ABIOIN, and IEEE/EMBS, in Biomedical Engineering education with a high impact on undergraduate and postgraduate students across 16 countries, including Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Canada, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Cuba, Ecuador, El Salvador, Honduras, Guatemala, Mexico, Nicaragua, Peru, and Panama. Over 300 students have participated in the program, focusing on leveraging emerging technologies to enhance elderly well-being. The participants have the opportunity to interact with the elderly in combination with a strategic pedagogical such as lectures, workshops, case analyses, visiting living labs, and networking, and the main activity is to carry out a Hackathon Challenge based on the elderly needs in a real study case from a multidisciplinary perspective, in a multicultural environment to develop technical and soft skills that allow the students to explore different challenges to develop innovative technical and ergonomic solutions, by integrating emerging technologies and addressing social needs. A multidisciplinary distinguished professor mentors this learning model on the innovation phases of conception, design, prototyping, validation with the user, and business model, considering the standards, ethical, and commercialization process to propose affordable solutions. Finally, the students present a pitch to an expert panel for evaluation and awards.