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Televic Healthcare, THC, is an independent SME company, founded in 1946 and active in the healthcare market since 1953 as part of the Televic group. THC designs, creates, builds and manufactures nurse call systems for the healthcare market (hospitals, nursing homes, service flats). To do this, THC has a R&D staff that encompasses different expertise (mechanical, electrical, RF, software, etc.) that is needed to create end to end solutions for our customers. Based upon its vision and long term customer relationships, THC has been able to establish itself as market leader for the Belgian market and is currently enlarging its market share in other European countries (with main focus on France & Germany). The combination of market approach & innovation has put THC on a path of steady growth of about 11% each year for the past 7 years, resulting in an turnover of 14M€ last year.
Role in the project: STHC will mainly focus on the validation activities in WP4, and will be involved in the other work packages activities relating to the healthcare environments. THC will especially bring its practical experience with testing localization algorithms in Healthcare environments to the project.
Experience: THC implements a clear strategy where long term research and innovation are combined with academic collaboration to target valorization. This focus on academic collaboration is also visible in the Televic technology board, an expert advisory group consisting of 5 domain experts (wireless, audio, video, networking & healthcare), of which 4 are professors. During the past 10 years THC has participated in a long list of research projects (all leading to publications in international journals, presentations on conferences and patent applications). Additionally this collaboration also has led to a guest professorship of Piet Verhoeve (at MMLab, ELIS, UGent).
THC considers wireless sensor & localization systems a vital element in the long term strategic vision to build person oriented nurse call systems and eHealth home monitoring systems (ambient assisted living). In order to realize this strategy, Televic has started several collaborations in order to acquire knowledge with respect to wireless systems: both on high bandwidth QoS systems (a track that already has been valorized with a concrete product line: “confidea” for the conference market of Televic Conference) as well as towards wireless mesh systems (oriented towards the healthcare sector). Hence Televic Healthcare has participated in several national research projects in the domains of mesh networking and indoor localization (national projects WBA, AWLANCHE, DEUS, and FISHNET). All of them resulted in new knowledge, publications and some patent applications.
dr. ir. Piet Verhoeve (°1968) has a Master of Science degree in Electrical Mechanical Engineering from the K.U.Leuven University (1991) and a Ph.D. degree in Electronic Engineering from the Gent University (1998), Belgium. He worked as a software architect in the domain of automatic speech recognition software at Lernout & Hauspie before he joined Televic in 2001. At first he was responsible for setting up innovation & research in collaboration with institutes, universities and engineering schools. Within four years he brought Televic from an unknown SME company to a well valued partner in several R&D projects collaborating with different universities on national and European level. As of 2004 he started exploring the new upcoming home care market and how to define use cases to bring the potential of eHealth technologies (such as localization, reasoning, context awareness) to real life implementations within the operational healthcare market. In 2007 he continued towards the operational business lead for the niche market Healthcare as business unit manager where he acquired hands on valorization experience. Last year he has taken up a position as director of Innovation & Technology at a strategic level of the company to define and enable long term oriented strategic projects and alliances for the Televic niche markets. Since April 2011, Piet Verhoeve has taken up a position as guest professor at the Multimedia Lab research group of department ELIS (Electronics & information systems), faculty of applied engineering at the University of Gent. He is Sr. member IEEE and (co)author of several publications and patent applications.
dr. ir. Pieter Crombez is a Senior R&D engineer in Televic’s healthcare communication division where he is responsible for the wireless research for next generation nurse call products. Currently he is focusing on localization techniques that meet the harsh specifications for the healthcare market. Previously he worked as a PhD researcher at the wireless group at IMEC, Leuven, Belgium on low power, reconfigurable transceivers for multistandard/multimode applications. He also worked as a research assistant at the ESAT-MICAS laboratory of the KU Leuven University. Pieter Crombez is a valid member of IEEE and (co)author of several publications.