The Health and Technology Research Lab (HTRL) is a transdisciplinary research environment at Blekinge Institute of Technology, working at the intersection of people, health, and technology. Our multidisciplinary team brings together researchers, doctoral students, and collaboration partners from academia, industry, regions, and municipalities, with a shared goal of using technology to support good health and quality of life across the lifespan. A central focus of our work is artificial intelligence and machine learning as clinical decision support. We develop and evaluate methods for the early prediction of dementia and Alzheimer's disease using data from the Swedish National Study on Ageing and Care in Blekinge (SNAC-B), and we investigate voice as a digital biomarker for the screening of conditions such as chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) and Parkinson's disease. Other active research areas include oral health and technology, where smart powered toothbrushes are used both to improve oral health in older adults with cognitive impairment and as a data source for early indication of cognitive decline, as well as sleep health and technology use in older adults, eHealth literacy, and digital participation. HTRL is also home to the Health and Technology Testbed at the BTH Research and Education Clinic, where companies and public organisations develop, test, and evaluate products and services in a clinical environment alongside researchers, students, and care professionals.

Applied health technology (AHT) at BTH is an interdisciplinary subject incorporating both studies on how health directly or indirectly relates to the application and results of technology. It has a firm user perspective in where both the inherent qualities of the technology and the user’s perception of the same technology together make up the resulting functionality. Engineering design together with the domain knowledge from the health disciplines make up the intersection where AHT can be found. The strong environment of aging research, product development research and applied ICT at BTH has given the special profile of research areas that connects to and sometimes are incorporated by AHT. Examples of such research areas are aging and technology (gerotechnology), interaction design and health informatics.