Professor Istepanian is globally recognized as one of the leading authorities and pioneer of the area of mobile healthcare (m-health) and the first scientist to have coined and defined this concept
After completing his PhD in Electronic and Electrical Engineering from Loughborough University, UK in 1994, he held several academic and research posts in UK and Canada. These included Professor of Data Communications for Healthcare and the founding Director of the Medical Information and Network Technologies Research Centre (MINT) at Kingston University, London, UK (2003-2013). Senior lectureships in the Universities of Portsmouth, UK (1995-1998) and Brunel University, London (2000-2003). A visiting Professor at St. George’s Medical School, University of London (2007-2009). Associate Professor Ryerson, Univeristy, Toronto and adjunct Professor at the University of West Ontario, Canada (1999-2000). He was also the 2008 Leverhulme distinguished visiting fellow at the Centre for Global e-health Innovation University of Toronto and the University’s Health Network, Canada.
He was awarded the 2009 IEEE award for the best IEEE Transactions and most cited paper from the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society for his seminal work and paper on mobile healthcare (m-health) published in 2004. He was also recipient of the IEE Heaviside award in 1999 from the Institution of Electrical Engineering (IEE), UK.
He lead successfully numerous funded multidisciplinary research projects in areas of m-health, e-health and telehealth funded by the Engineering and Physical Research Council (EPSRC), UK, The European Commission (EU) , the British Council, the Royal Society, the Royal Academy of Engineering and the Leverhulme Trust. In addition to leading industrial sponsored projects and clinical trials in these areas funded by global telecom and mobile industries (Motorola, USA and France Telecom/ Orange, France).
He served as the vice chair of the International Telecommunication Union (ITU’s) focus group on standardization of Machine to Machine (M2M) for developing e-health service layer for machine-to-machine communication standards (2012-2013). He also served as expert on numerous assessment and peer evaluation panels in areas of healthcare technology innovations, wellbeing, m-health and e-health including Holland’s (Dutch – Philips (STW) partnership programme on ‘Healthy Life Style’, 2011-2105). Ireland’s (Science Foundation Ireland SFI- Strategic Research Cluster Grants, peer review panel, 2008, 2011), Finland’s (Finnish Strategic Centers of Science, Technology and Innovation (SHOK) on advances on wellbeing programme, 2012) and Canada’s (Canada Foundation for Innovation’s (CFI) of large scale strategic and leading edge projects for health services in Canada, 2009). In addition as peer reviewer and panelist for the following UK Funding bodies: EPSRC, BBSRC, Wellcome Trust, Department of Health (DOH), Service Delivery Organisation (SDO), Department of Health (DOH), Health Innovation Challenge Fund, National Institute of Health Research (NIHR), BUPA Foundation, Diabetes – UK.
Professor Istepanian was invited to numerous keynote talks and lectures at international conferences and meetings in the UK, EU, USA, Canada and other countries. These include, amongst others, the 11th. Armenian Medical World Congress (Los Angeles, 2013); The 3rd Annual Internet of Things Europe Conference (Brussels, 2011); the LTE World Summit (Holland, 2011); the mobile health industry summit in London, 2010, Institute of Engineering and Technology (IET), Assisted Living 2011 Conference, (London, 2011), Experts forum member – World leading diabetes expert’s forum , International Diabetes Federation- IDF, World Diabetes Congress’, Dubai, 2011), the 26th Wireless World Research Forum (WWRF), (Qatar, 2011); the annual Harvard and Partners Telemedicine Conference on ‘Optimising Care Through Communication Technologies’ (Boston, 2005); ‘Building on Broadband Britain’ Conference (London, 2005) and the second International Conference on Smart Homes and Health Telematics, ICOST (Singapore-2004).
He also served on numerous technical committee of the IEEE and other international conferences and chaired several organising and technical committees of national and international conferences in UK, USA 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) of (1997, 1998, 1999, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009,2011 and 2012).
He also served on the editorial board of several IEEE transactions and international journals’ including IEEE Transaction on Information Technology in Biomedicine (1997-2011), IEEE Transactions on NanoBioScience ( 2003-2013) and IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing(2005-2011), Int. J. of Telemedicine and Applications (2007-2012 and Journal of Mobile Multimedia (2004-2013), Journal of World Medical & Health Policy. He also served as guest editor of several special issues of the IEEE Transactions, including IEEE Transactions on Information Technology in Biomedicine in areas of mobile health (2000, 2004, and 2012) and IEEE Transactions of NanoBioScience (on Microarray Image Processing, 2004).
He has published more than 200 peer reviewed publications and edited three books in the areas of mobile communications for healthcare, m-health, control systems and biomedical signal processing with Google citation h-index of 27. He recently co-authored a new book on mobile health entitled ‘m-health Fundamentals and Applications’ IEEE- Wiley, 2015.