ESBiomech24 Congress in Edinburgh

From the President

Thanks to Vienna team and all participants of ESB conference 2019

I would like to start thanking Dieter Pahr, Christian Hellmich and Phillip Thurner for an amazing and stimulating conference. It was not only the fabulous venue, the whole conference, was scientifically speaking, on top of previous ESB conferences: three inspiring Keynote speakers (Kalpana Katti, Laurence Vico and Wolfgang Wall), the motivational Huiskes Lecture by Ralph Müller and more than 600 scientific talks. We also commemorated John Currey who passed away in December 2018. Finally, we also had many recognitions to our youngest members with the ESB awards.

What is next after H2020… Horizon Europe …

Horizon 2020 is almost finishing. We walk towards Horizon Europe (2021- 2027) in the Health sector as one of the clusters within Pillar 2 “Global Challenges and European Industrial Competitiveness”. Many challenges should be tackled within our ESB community as the side effects of an ageing population, among other issues. In fact, our ESB community (you!) is developing new diagnostic tools, creating more effective therapies, working on modelling and simulation in conjunction with pre-clinical and clinical experimentation, development of medical devices, etc.

Many of us are working in the development of predictive technologies using, for example, computer models and simulations. In fact, the use of the concept of a digital twin in healthcare was written in the Horizon Europe legal framework. Our colleagues of the VPH Institute are also highly promoting the idea of transforming computational modelling from a valuable scientific tool to a valuable regulatory tool. We should also work towards this direction and the next year will be crucial to achieve this goal. To develop and to robustly confirm the credibility of such predictive technologies, it is essential to create collections of data. For example, our colleague Bill Taylor and his team has just released one the largest dataset of kinematics and kinetics of the knee musculoskeletal system (CAMS-Knee). But not only data is needed, further development of digital technologies is crucial, as for example, artificial intelligence (AI). In our community more and more research works are using AI or machine learning techniques as an innovative technology.

All of these aspects will be part of the next Horizon Europe program, and I hope that the biomechanics community will be rightly positioned playing an important role.

It is time to prepare contributions for Milano 2020

In the following days, you will receive the call for abstracts for our 26th Congress in Milano. The organizers (Francesco Migliavaca, Gabriele Dubini, Manuela Galli, Alberto Redaelli and all their team) are hard at working putting together session topics in which everyone can find a place for their research. Please, have a look at the congress tracks.

The last ESB congress in Italy took place in Rome in 1992 and now we are back to Italy. The first National Chapter was created in 2011 and it was the Italian one. I have to say that they are quite active and more than 12% of our members are Italians.

In Milano, the following awards can be competed for: the SM Perren Award, Best thesis, Student award, Clinical Biomechanics, Mobility Award and Travel awards. We would like to encourage all our members to take part in these awards competitions, mainly our student members. Don’t miss the deadlines! We will also have next council elections. More information about nominations and the voting procedure will be available in the Spring Newsletter. Start thinking about it!

I hope to see all of you in Milano.

María Angeles Pérez Ansón, Zaragoza 2019.


Corporate members of the ESB:

AMTI force and motion logo
BERTEC logo
Beta CAE logo
BoB Biomechanics logo
Materialise logo
Nobel Biocare logo