Maritta Perälä-Heape

Dr. Maritta Perälä-Heape, Director at Centre for Health and Technology (CHT), University of Oulu, Finland. She is managing the strategic and systematic R&D&I collaboration between academia, business and public healthcare sector in OuluHealth ecosystem; (www.ouluhealth.fi). She is active in creating international and strategic partnership networks. The focus areas are personalized health and care, service innovations and business development.

She is leading several R&D projects. One of them is a large strategic initiative called “Digital Health Revolution” (http://www.digitalhealthrevolution.fi/). This national multi-disciplinary research project focuses on the scientific, economic, ethical, societal, legal and political aspects of personal health data in order to increase individual’s health capability, related business and societal aims.

The vision of Digital Health Revolution –initiative is that future healthcare will allow citizens to control and make use of his or her personal data from genomics to digital footprint. In addition, the aim is to develop successful personal data movement across services (MyData approach) and thus support individual’s capability and motivation to promote health.