Date and time: Thursday 11 June 2026, 11:45-13:00 CEST (incl. FREE LUNCH*)
Speaker: Steffen Leonhardt, Aachen University
Title: Control of therapeutic systems – why mother nature is closing the loop and why we should do this, too!
Where: Digital Futures hub, Osquars Backe 5, floor 2 at KTH main campus OR Zoom
Directions: https://www.digitalfutures.kth.se/contact/how-to-get-here/
OR
Zoom: https://kth-se.zoom.us/j/69560887455
*To get a FREE LUNCH, you need to register — first come, first served. Maximum 50 participants.
The hub will be open 30 minutes before and after the event for those who wish to stay longer.
Host: to be announced
Bio: Steffen Leonhardt (SM’06, F’26) received the M.S. degree from SUNY at Buffalo, NY, USA, the Dipl.-Ing. and the Ph.D. degree in control engineering from TU Darmstadt, Germany, and the M.D. degree from Goethe University Frankfurt, Germany. After almost 5 years of duty as a Research and Development Manager for Dräger Medical AG&Co KGaA, Lübeck, Germany, he was recruited as a Full Professor in Biomedical Engineering at RWTH Aachen University in 2003, where he has been the Philips Endowed Chair of Medical Information Technology til 2017. His research interests include closed-loop control and automation in medicine, bioimpedance, unobtrusive sensing, biomedical signal processing and machine learning.
Steffen Leonhardt is a Fellow of the North Rhine-Westphalian Academy of Sciences, Humanities and the Arts (2014), Düsseldorf, Germany, a Fellow of the German “National Academy of Science and Engineering” (acatech, 2023), Berlin/Munich and a Fellow of the IEEE EMBS (2026). From 2015 to 2018, he served as the President for the International Society for Bioelectromagnetism, from 2015 to 2016 he was appointed an IEEE EMBS Distinguished Lecturer. In 2018, he received the Doctor Honoris Causa from the Czech Technical University in Prague, Czech Republic. Furthermore, in that year he has been appointed Distinguished Professor at IIT Madras, Chennai, India. His publication record can be found at:
https://scholar.google.de/citations?hl=de&user=GZo4IYgAAAAJ.
Among other duties, he currently serves as an associate editor for the IEEE Transactions on Biomedical Engineering, the IEEE Journal of Biomedical and Health Informatics and the journal Biomedical Engineering / Biomedizinische Technik. He is on the editorial board of the Journal of Clinical Monitoring and Computing and has been an associate editor for the IEEE Transactions on Biomedical Circuits and Systems from 2011 to 2020. Since 2024, he serves on the review board 4.41 “Systems Engineering” of the German Research Foundation (DFG).
Abstract: This talk will focus on the principles behind closed-loop systems in physiology. Starting with the general concept of homeostasis, we will then cover selected closed loop systems at the organ level. As an illustrative example, we will look at the control loop for temperature. Afterwards, we will introduce categories for closed-loop controlled therapeutic devices and illustrate this with selected examples. Finally, we will focus on the Hardware-in-the-loop (HiL) concept connecting physiological models and model-based validation with devices.
