Marcelo Milrad

“The close contact we have with our partners allows us to move and act a little faster than others”

APRIL 2024 DIGITALISATION | Working closely and innovatively – with schools in education, with industry through industrial applications, with the public sector in e-health, and with museums in the humanities. This is the recipe for the knowledge environment Digital Transformations, where researchers and teachers from widely different subjects together tackle the opportunities and challenges of digitalising society.

There are eight billion people on Earth. Two billion of these have access to running water. Six billion have access to mobile phones and the internet. These are figures that Marcelo Milrad, professor of media technology at Linnaeus University, highlights to provide a perspective on how far digitalisation has come.

– Digitalisation no longer concerns only digital technology itself, but also various interdisciplinary aspects that digitalisation leads to, such as organisational, social, or economic aspects, for example. Digitalisation has affected the way we live and work, in the same way as life changed after other technological revolutions such as the printing press or the car.

A sustainable digital society

These are the aspects that the knowledge environment Digital Transformations, lead by Marcelo, deals with. Addressing society’s challenges in the area of digitalisation, by developing and spreading the knowledge required to create digitally competent individuals and organisations, who in turn can create a sustainable digital society. Because digitalisation has both advantages and disadvantages, he is careful to point out.

Marcelo Milrad

– Digitalisation helps us organise in a more efficient way; draw smarter conclusions. It can be a good basis for well-informed decisions that couldn’t be made before.

– At the same time, digitalisation changes the ways of socialising that we’ve been used to. This doesn’t mean that the old ways were better than those we have today, but it’s different now. We lose human contact, and I see that as a huge risk.

One problem, Marcelo argues, is that many people today focus on many things at once and cannot focus on what they really need to focus on. He sees quite clearly that students have difficulty concentrating. Another problem is that people find it harder to express themselves face to face.

– There’s this concept of immediacy. People want everything to happen at once, like when you tweet or snap. Then it gets problematic if you think that life in general should be lived in the same way. It takes an incredibly long time to build relationships that can lead to friendships or marriage.

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Working closely

Digital Transformations currently focuses on five areas – e-health, digital learning, digital humanities, digital business development, and digital working life – collaborating with partners regionally, nationally, and internationally in many different ways.

– We have projects in medicine and healthcare that involve analysing data to predict what could happen. And also on applied artificial intelligence in the world of education. Helping small business owners understand the benefits of the Internet of Things in their operations is a third example of how broad, yet focused, our work is, says Marcelo Milrad.

– What I want to highlight is the working method we use: working closely, in the field of human-computer interaction. We’re well on our way. We’re innovative in how we work with our partners. Industry through industrial applications. The public sector in e-health. Schools in education, and museums in the humanities.

– The close contact that we, as a relatively small university, have with our partners allows us to move and act a little faster than others.

E-health – “Users need to participate in co-creating tools and solutions”

Sofia Backåberg

Digital technology can contribute to efficient, safe, and sustainable health and welfare, as well as to good and equitable health in the population. In the project Confidence in every step, Sofia Backåberg, senior lecturer in health sciences, is researching how technology and digital solutions can support elderly people living at home, helping them maintain and exercise their physical abilities and independence.

– We’ve developed a video-based tool that health professionals can use together with elderly people in reflective conversations and as support for raising awareness and improving movement quality and physical functioning. We have also applied for a project on how to use sensor-based technology to detect changes in activity and illness at an early stage, allowing for interventions such as fall prevention.

– We need to be aware that elderly people can’t be lumped together into a single group. They’re as heterogeneous as the rest of society, ranging from tech-savvy to tech-averse. When we develop technology, we need to take this into account.

– For digital tools to be used, users need to participate in co-creating tools and solutions, as well as in designing how they should be used in everyday life. Consequently, we use co-design, which involves users already at the early stages of the process. Development must be needs-driven, not technology-driven; this is extremely important.

Major challenges are interdisciplinary

Within Digital Transformations, Marcelo Milrad and his colleagues work across disciplines. Researchers and teaching staff from different subjects and backgrounds collaborate to tackle challenges in digitalisation, aiming to find new, interesting solutions that can benefit society.

– We work across disciplines because most major societal challenges are global and complex, such as climate change, migration, and economic systems. There is no single expert – or single discipline, even – that could address them on their own”, says Marcelo.

From biomedicine to human-computer interaction

– In my family, everyone’s a doctor, and I wanted to go on and study biomedicine to help those with visual and hearing impairments. My plan was to work with brain implants so that people with disabilities could regain the abilities they lack.

– So I studied to become a master of science in computer and electrical engineering and got an opportunity to do this, but it also involved experimenting in a lab, placing electrodes on monkeys’ brains. That was against my values, as I'm an animal lover. So, I left that path and ended up instead on the slightly softer side, with media technology, human-computer interaction, and artificial intelligence.

– When I turned 13 and started secondary school, I got to choose a school with a technical focus. I chose to study computer science and electronics, and everyone said, ‘Great, that’s the future’. Four decades later, I’m working with similar things, and everyone says, ‘That’s great, you have something to do in the future’”, says Marcelo, laughing.

Many processes within digital transformations entail risks that must be considered, involving aspects such as responsible artificial intelligence or ethics.

– Our work is not just about research, but also about how we should educate our future citizens. It’s a challenge. With today’s programmes and courses, it’ll be difficult to meet the needs that will arise in areas such as elderly care in... I’m not talking about 20 years, but 6–7 years. What educational programmes do we have in economics, the social sciences, and healthcare that address the issue of our rapidly ageing society?

Identifying the problems

So, what is important to consider in digitalisation?

– To first identify what problems you want to solve by means of digitalisation. If you don’t know what you’re doing, you’ll just create more problems.

– Unfortunately, it’s not uncommon to introduce a system without knowing the purpose of the digitalisation – what we aim to gain, what we should do differently… What are the benefits and what are the risks? That’s fundamental!