Hugo Plácido da Silva

Hugo Plácido da Silva is the 2023 IEEE Entrepreneurship Impact Award recipient.

Hugo is an award-winning inventor, researcher, and entrepreneur, having co-founded multiple innovative technology-based companies, operating in the fields of biomedical devices and data science for healthcare and quality of life. He completed his Ph.D. in Electrical and Computers Engineering from the Instituto Superior Técnico (IST), University of Lisbon (UL), where he is currently an Invited Assistant Professor. Hugo Plácido da Silva is also a Senior Researcher at the Instituto de Telecomunicações (IT), to which he has been affiliated since 2004.

He is also one of the founders of PLUX – Wireless Biosignals, S.A., a global reference in the field of medical devices, where Hugo is currently a Board Member and Chief Innovation Officer. Both at a technical and scientific level, he has actively contributed to and participated in more than 50 national and international projects, funded by grants from Horizon Europe, Horizon 2020, Portugal 2020, Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia (FCT), and several other private and public institutions (e.g., Vodafone, Nokia, etc.). Hugo has seven granted patents and published 250+ papers in peer-reviewed journals, international refereed conferences, and book chapters.                                                               

He has been actively working to make the world a little more physiological, through BITalino, a low-cost hardware and open-source software kit that currently has tens of thousands of users worldwide, and that allows anyone, from students to professionals, to develop projects and applications that incorporate biomedical signals.

His work has been distinguished both internationally and domestically with several awards, including the “Career Award alumniIPS,” the “Best Industrial and Enabling Technology” at the European Commission’s DG-CONNECT Innovation Radar Prize, and the Ordem dos Engenheiros Young Engineer Innovation Award, to name a few.

Hugo has been an IEEE Senior Member since 2018 and an IEEE Member since 2010, affiliated with the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society. Furthermore, he is an active member of the IEEE Portugal Section, where he is currently the Industry Relations Coordinator and a Vice-Chair position of the IEEE EMBS Portugal Chapter. More recently, he has also been appointed Member of the European Laboratory for Learning and Intelligent Systems (ELLIS) / Lisbon Unit for Learning and Intelligent Systems (LUMLIS).