About The Centre

• To achieve academic excellence in the advancement and application of bioengineering for health and rehabilitation care, offering preferred undergraduate and postgraduate educational programs underpinned by rigorous research and development activities.
• To offer user-focused services in assistive and rehabilitation technology, to facilitate self directed living, equal opportunities, and full participation for people with a disability.

Biomedical Engineering and Rehabilitation Engineering are fast expanding, intensively interdisciplinary technologies.  Biomedical Engineering seeks to apply engineering principles and techniques in understanding life phenomena and in solving technical problems in the biomedical context. Rehabilitation Engineering, an important sub-field within Biomedical Engineering, aims to improve the life quality, including the independence and productivity, of persons with disabilities via the application of existing and emerging technologies.

Local career prospects are expected to increase substantially in the years ahead.  Opportunities shall include medical product development, technical sale of medical devices and multidisciplinary project management in the commercial sector.  Opportunities in the hospital-based clinical engineering would also improve as the local health care sector continues to develop.

The Jockey Club Rehabilitation Engineering Centre (REC) was established in 1987 as a specialist centre. It is now a formal academic unit of the Faculty of Health and Social Sciences, while simultaneously maintaining many interdisciplinary programs with other faculties, particularly the Faculty of Engineering.

Besides offering direct expert services to the disabled and rehabilitation communities in Hong Kong, staff of the Centre over the years have successfully developed many interdisciplinary research projects in biomedical and rehabilitation engineering, in collaboration with other institutions in Hong Kong or elsewhere. The Centre has become a local focus of rigorous biomedical and rehabilitation engineering activities, which have gained recognition from beyond the territory.

The Centre also contributes significantly to postgraduate activities at the PolyU through the supervision of postgraduate research degree candidates and through the teaching of biomedical and rehabilitation engineering modules in the modular postgraduate schemes. In collaboration with other PolyU departments and the two medical schools in Hong Kong, the Centre provides supervision of more than twenty postgraduate research students and research assistants.

REC also hosts the Research Centre for Musculoskeletal Bioengineering - a joint university collaborative centre of excellence located in the Hong Kong Polytechnic University. The Research Centre started as the Interdisciplinary Centre for Musculoskeletal Bioengineering and Rehabilitation Technology in 1994 with the support of an initiation grant from the University Grants Committee of Hong Kong. As a research and development unit, it is unique in the territory, multidisciplinary and application-oriented. The establishment of the Interdisciplinary Centre makes available to all interested colleagues a special pool of professional expertise and centralized facilities in a multidisciplinary environment. The Centre facilitates collaborations in musculoskeletal bioengineering and rehabilitation technology among the different disciplines. The Interdisciplinary Centre was formally recognised as a PolyU Research Centre in 2000.