Speaker

Professor Pedro Bertemes-Filho

Topic

Most of us assume that getting a medical diagnosis requires a hospital, a specialist, and days of waiting. But what if a device no bigger than a pen — or a watch on your wrist — could detect cancer or monitor diabetes on the spot, in your own community, without needles or laboratories? In this seminar, Professor Pedro Bertemes-Filho will explore how safe electrical signals can “listen” to the human body and reveal what is happening inside our tissues. Drawing on 30 years of research and his own clinical trials in Brazil, he will discuss the development of a cervical cancer screening probe tested on over 630 patients, and eGluco — a non-invasive glucose-monitoring smartwatch achieving 97.6% accuracy in intensive care patients and now entering production. He will also reflect on why these technologies matter most for indigenous and remote communities, where geography too often determines whether disease is caught in time, and what it would take to bring this kind of diagnostic equity to Aotearoa New Zealand.

About the Speaker

Professor Pedro Bertemes-Filho is a Full Professor of Electrical Engineering at the State University of Santa Catarina (UDESC), Brazil, where he leads the Biomedical Engineering Research Group. Originally from Florianópolis, Brazil, he completed his PhD in Medical Physics at the University of Sheffield and has since held research positions at the University of São Paulo, the University of Sheffield, and Dartmouth College in the United States as a Fulbright Scholar. He is an internationally recognised expert in electrical bioimpedance — the science of using safe electrical signals to characterise biological tissue — with applications spanning cancer diagnostics, non-invasive glucose monitoring, biosensors, and medical imaging. His work has been cited over 1,500 times globally, and he holds four active patents, including for the eGluco wearable glucometer. He is an IEEE Senior Member, a CNPq Research Productivity Fellow, and Editor of some books.