Associate Professor Sze-Yuan Ooi

Sze-Yuan holds a Conjoint Professor position with UNSW with a close association with the Tyree Foundation Institute of Health Engineering UNSW Sydney. I have been involved in many industry-driven studies involving novel stent and cardiac device technologies. He was the global Principal Investigator for the BioMonitor-2 first-in-human study of a novel implantable cardiac monitor, presenting the study findings at CardioStim, an International electrophysiology and devices meeting in 2016. He was an invited speaker on the topic of implantable loop recorders and member of faculty at the 2017 US Heart Rhythm Society meeting. 

Sze-Yuan has co-designed, validated and implemented a smartphone application-based model of care, in collaboration with Prof Nigel Lovell, Graduate School of Biomedical Engineering UNSW. A pilot study assessing this system, TeleClinical Care (TCC) was completed in 2020. In conjunction with (co-CIA) Prof Lovell, he was awarded $1.89M in funding from the NSW Ministry of Health to conduct a large randomised controlled trial of TCC across multiple sites in New South Wales. He (CIB) was also awarded a $1.7M MRFF Cardiovascular grant to conduct a randomised controlled trial of an iterative version of this model of care for stroke patients (TCC-Stroke).  Sze-Yuan led the co-design of a remote monitoring solution for COVID-19 patients isolating in the community (TCC-COVID).  This system was implemented across the South Eastern Sydney Local Health District (SESLHD) during the COVID-19 pandemic, monitoring over 9,000 patients. In 2023, in partnership with Prof Lovell, we formed a startup company, Apostele, that supports this and other planned works that form the centrepiece of the Remote Patient Monitoring service in the Randwick Precinct redevelopment which delivers virtual care to multiple patient cohorts across the SESLHD community. Sze-Yuan was a named Partner Investigator on the ARC Hub for Connected sensors for Health ($5M, Chun Wang). He was invited to co-author an American Heart Association commissioned scientific statement on Telehealth and Health Equity in older adults with heart failure. Sze-Yuan has been invited to present this work at numerous meetings including the Australian Academy of Technological Sciences & Engineering (ATSE) 2022 seminar, the 45th Annual International Conference of the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society (EMBC2023), the St Vincent’s Hospital Research Symposium 2021, the Pen CS 2021 National Primary Healthcare Network Conference, the National Cardiology Heads of Department meeting 2023 and as the keynote speaker at the 2024 Austrian D-Health conference. 

Sze-Yuan is the lead clinician and data custodian for the Cardiac Analytics and Innovation (CardiacAI) project.  In collaboration with the Centre for Big Data Research in Health UNSW Sydney, the CardiacAI group has developed and is currently piloting systems that allow for the automated collection of EMR data for cardiac patients upon which data-analytics and machine learning algorithms may be applied to improve patient care.  The CardiacAI data repository houses over 8 years of retrospective EMR data as well as a nightly prospective data extract for all cardiac patients across SESLHD and the Illawarra Shoalhaven LHD (ISLHD).  The CardiacAI group has been awarded 2 MRFF Cardiovascular Mission grants, an MRFF Research Data Infrastructure Grant and a UNSW CVMM Big Ideas grant (total funding >$7M) to expand the data repository to include stroke patients, add data from 2 additional Local Health Districts in New South Wales and build machine-learning algorithms to drive clinical decision support tools. I have been invited to present this work at numerous meetings including the NSW Cardiovascular Research Network 2022 workshop, the 2022 Australasian Institute of Digital Health Digital Summit, the 2023 Australian Cardiovascular Alliance Data Dashboard workshop, the 2023 Combined NSW Research Translation Centres Cardiovascular Symposium and the 2023 Sydney Cardiovascular Symposium.