MELETI
Medical Engineering Listed Education & Training Information
The Internet-based service MELETI (Medical Engineering Listed Education & Training Information) is an initiative aiming to establish an electronic documentation point for information on training, education and research activities with a specific focus in the field of biomedical engineering at a European level or even international level. This web-based service aims to offer information and guidance on education, training and continuous professional development activities in biomedical engineering and its related subspecialties. The information provided by MELETI includes directories of biomedical engineering education and training courses, R&D projects, inventories of books, journals and catalogues of training tools in multimedia format. The main advantage of MELETI is that all information is validated and presented in a standardised format by the interested parties, aiming to promote their activities. This guarantees an equal level of detail and increased objectivity, thus allowing com-parative evaluations and informed decisions.
This service is addressed to various user groups. Firstly, it can guide students to their graduate or postgraduate studies, professionals to their continuing education and unemployed professionals to career reorientation. On the other hand, it is an equally important means of dissemination of information for universities, training centres, professional associations, research organizations, authorities and publishers, that can promote their activities. The information contained in MELETI is open to anyone interested and no registration procedures are required. Furthermore it is very simple for universities, training centres, publishers and R&D institutes to insert information into the MELETI database, following a simple on-line registration process intended to maintain the relevance and the credibility of the information. These so-called 'MELETI Members' are free to continuously insert new or update existing information.
Currently MELETI contains information on about 50 university programmes offering graduate or postgraduate programs in biomedical engineering, 100 books, 50 journals and about 80 R&D projects, and effort is being made to collect information on short seminars, training programs and electronic-based educational material. The lasting impact of MELETI is clearly dependent on the information it contains both in terms of accuracy and volume. This in turn is achieved through the widespread participation of the parties concerned. In this dissemination effort, the involvement of professional associations, such as the IFMBE and its member societies, is extremely valuable. MELETI was developed under the Leonardo da Vinci Programme and was co-ordinated by INBIT with the participation of five partner organisations1 from five European countries.
1 Coordinating Organization: Institute of Biomedical Technology,
Boukaouri 93, Patras 262 25, Greece
Partner organizations: The Medical Informatics
Department of the Vrije University of Brussels, The National Institute for Hospital
and Medical Engineering (ORKI) in Budapest, The Bioengineering Unit of the Federico
II University of Naples, The National School of Public Health of the New University
of Lisbon, The Medical Physics Department of the University of Patras
Nick Kontodimopoulos
Biomedical Engineer M.Sc.
INBIT
Email: nikon@inbit.gr
URL: www.inbit.gr/meleti