About Us

“Good health and well-being, responsible consumption and production, climate action and partnerships” are the goals, that constitute sustainability in medical technology. In its R&D acitivites ACMIT addresses in particular the following Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs):

Good Health & Well-Being
ACMIT's contribution to this sustainability goal is to develop new methods and tools for improved diagnosis and therapy. One of the main objectives behind each of ACMIT's development projects is to develop new technology that can provide reproducible and optimal patient outcome, even when such technology is being used by less experienced users. The "democratisation of therapy and treatment" is achieved through the transfer of expert knowledge via implemented system functionalities and optimised workflows. This concept makes modern therapies accessible to a large group of patients, especially in regions with less developed medical care.

Quality Education
As a leading international R&D centre, ACMIT successfully connects science and industry, enabling innovation and sustainable economic growth. To ensure a high-level education in medical engineering, ACMIT offers positions at different educational levels, e.g. internships, bachelor projects, master projects and PhD positions. Know-how is actively disseminated through scientific publications, lectures and participation in scientific events, but also through information events for the general public, such as "The Long Night of Science" and others.
 

Gender Equality
ACMIT offers women and men equal opportunities for their professional development and has implemented an efficient set of procedures in order to support gender equality and to reach and maintain its related target numbers. More details can be found here. In terms of project design and implementation, e.g. in the framework of requirement assessment, usability evaluation, clinical investigation – gender balance will be considered as strict as possible. In particular, ACMIT pays attention to a balanced distribution of pathologies for both patient groups male and female. For common pathologies, acquired and used data sets (e.g. training data for AI algorithms) will be in full gender balance.

Decent Work & Economic Growth
The constantly growing medical technology market is one of the international driving factors for economic welfare. Technologies developed by ACMIT and its partners make an important contribution to the early detection and effective treatment of diseases. In particular for low-and-medium-income-countries medical products are developed in collaboration with representatives from these countries, giving the people there access to better medical treatment and enabling them to build up their economies. This creates new opportunities, stimulates education and leads to decent working conditions in these countries.

Industry, Innovation & Infrastructure
Innovation is the foundation of everything we do at ACMIT to fulfill our mission: "from idea to clinical use". By working with the best in science and industry, we succeed in establishing real innovations in the medical technology market. Numerous examples (see our project references) are impressive proof of this. Additionally, ACMIT has tailored its range of services specifically to the needs of start-ups in order to supplement missing activities and thus increase their probability of success and the number of medical technology innovations. Last but not least, this also provides particular support for ACMIT's own start-ups.

Reduced Inequalities
Two-thirds of the world’s population are lacking safe and timely surgical care. The launch of the Global Surgery movement in 2015 was met with great enthusiasm and encouraging first efforts by international organisations to partake in what appeared to be the next big step in global health delivery. Even if the total number of surgeries increased, most low-and-medium-income-countries (LMIC) still have very low surgical volumes. To contribute to a reduction of this inacceptable level of inequalities, a significant share of ACMIT’s strategic project budget is dealing with the development of medical technology for LMIC.

Responsible Consumption & Production
While socially oriented SDGs such as health, equality and education are well achievable for medical technology, the more environmentally oriented goals appear to be slower to take hold in this sector than in other areas. This may be due to regulatory requirements that medical devices must comply with before they can come onto the market. However, there are also several opportunities for environmental improvements in the medical device sector, that will be thoroughly investigated by ACMIT. The following aspects will be strongly considered in each development activity towards novel medical products:

• Use of sustainable materials (considering resource efficiency, low-emission production, reusability/degradability, etc)
• Reduction of packaging waste (also regarding EU Directives 94/62/EC and 2018/852)
• Increasing lifetime in order to decrease waste
• Implementing “circular economy” strategies (optimization reprocessing and recycling)

The content of this publication has not been approved by the United Nations and does not reflect the views of the United Nations or its officials or Member States.
United Nations Sustainable Development Goals