Faculty of Biomedical Engineering

On November 15, 2025, during the Sword AI Summit in Porto (Portugal), Dr. Aleksandra Badura received the prestigious Horizon Award 2025, granted by the Sword Foundation, part of Sword Health. The award recognizes the most innovative research on pain, with a particular focus on non-surgical and non-pharmacological treatment methods. Out of 966 publications published in 2024, 27 papers were selected for the final round, and the winner was an article co-authored by Dr. Badura in Scientific Data: Gouverneur P., Badura A., Li F., Bieńkowska M., Luebke L., Adamczyk W.M., Szikszay T.M., Myśliwiec A., Luedtke K., Grzegorzek M., Piętka E.: An Experimental and Clinical Physiological Signal Dataset for Automated Pain Recognition. Sci Data 11, 1051 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41597-024-03878-w

The research was recognized for its pioneering use of wearable sensor data in pain research, the creation of one of the first open, clinically validated databases, and laying the foundation for personalized healthcare based on artificial intelligence. The database and article are the result of the project “Multimodal platform for pain monitoring in physiotherapy (PainMonit)”, carried out in 2019–2022 by the Department of Medical Informatics and Artificial Intelligence of the Silesian University of Technology in cooperation with the University of Lübeck (Germany), APA sp. z o.o., and the Institute of Experimental Psychology (Germany). 

The project was managed by Prof. Ewa Piętka, PhD, Eng., and Dr. Maria Bieńskowska, PhD, Eng., was also involved on behalf of the Department of Medical Informatics and Artificial Intelligence. Data related to physiotherapy procedures was collected in cooperation with Prof. Andrzej Myśliwiec, PhD, from the Jerzy Kukuczka Academy of Physical Education in Katowice and his team.

Congratulations to the entire team, and we wish you continued scientific success.