Introduction to Smart Lab
Smart Lab is an innovative initiative by the Faculty of Medicine in Monastir, unique in its kind in Tunisia. It was launched to offer a collaborative work framework between multiple disciplines, primarily medicine, engineering, and artificial intelligence technologies.
Objective and Approach
The objective of Smart Lab is to create a collaborative ecosystem where each profile can contribute to solving medical problems. In this sense, the laboratory acts as an idea incubator, encouraging experimentation and skill sharing. The lab features a specially designed room to facilitate collaboration between disciplines, making it easy for researchers from the faculties of medicine and engineering to exchange ideas.
Collaborative Process
The idea is based on a collaborative process: a student proposes an idea, an engineer designs a prototype, a doctor evaluates its clinical relevance, and the entire team refines it until a validated product is obtained. This development chain constitutes the core of the Smart Lab approach.
Notable Projects
Among the projects developed within Smart Lab, some stand out for their social and medical impact. For example, the device being worked on by Wahbi Saied, a researcher in artificial intelligence, aims to improve the quality of life for breast cancer patients by mitigating the long-term side effects of chemotherapy. This project is emblematic of the Smart Lab approach: an idea from the medical field, concretized by engineering, and designed from the start for practical and useful application.
Challenges and Future Development
Despite these successes, the development of Smart Lab is hindered by several obstacles. One of the main challenges is the lack of supervision in areas outside the medical field, such as robotics, advanced engineering, or innovation management. Therefore, it is necessary to find useful solutions to overcome these challenges and support this idea, which can lead Tunisia far in terms of progress, especially in medicine.
