DrMarco Alban Paccha

Marco’s research aims to overcome the systemic barriers that limit the impact of wearable and implantable biomedical devices. His work focuses on the technologies that surround and enable sensing hardware, treating the full stack:from materials, sensors and analogue electronics, through embedded firmware and communications, to secure data handling and AI analytics, as a co-designed system tailored for clinical translation. 

At the hardware level, the group develops analogue front ends for biopotential, electrochemical, and multimodal biosensing, with careful attention to noise, power consumption, and signal fidelity. These are integrated with embedded electronics and wireless backends that support robust field capture and real-time streaming. Low-power architectures and energy-aware system design are core to this work, enabling devices to operate autonomously for extended periods without compromising performance. 

On the data side, Marco’s research covers signal processing, sensor fusion, and clinically informed machine learning techniques to extract meaningful biomarkers from physiological and neurotech data. This includes real-world clinical wearable datasets targeting stress, pain, cardiovascular function, and neurological conditions, where challenges such as synchronisation, annotation, privacy, and explainability are integral to both engineering and translational outcomes. 

Projects in the group exemplify this integrated strategy. These include neurotechnology systems for efficient acquisition and secure transmission of high-throughput neural data; wearable platforms for cuffless cardiovascular monitoring with seamless smartphone analytics; and organic electrochemical transistor-based multimodal sensing for metabolic and biochemical monitoring. These initiatives serve both as technical testbeds and as pathways to clinical studies. 

Marco’s research also engages deeply with clinical communities, working on studies such as the ADVANTAGE consortium’s efforts to understand visceral pain mechanisms using wearable electronics and mobile applications. Through these collaborations, the group ensures that engineering developments are informed by clinical workflows, regulatory environments, and patient-centric considerations.