The Biotechnology and Biomedical Cluster of the Balearic Islands (BIOIB) attended 4YFN 2025, a reference space for the startup ecosystem, fully integrated into the Mobile World Congress (MWC) in Barcelona from 2021. This year, under the slogan ‘Navigating tomorrow’s healthcare: cutting-edge technologies’, digital health has made a strong return to this event, driven by the technological and digital revolution, consolidating itself as one of the main areas of innovation, interest and debate.
This year’s MWC has shown that healthcare and technology are converging to accelerate an unprecedented transformation. The integration of new technologies in healthcare is no longer just a trend but an imperative need that is redefining the delivery of healthcare services.
Digital Health & Wellness Summit: AI and the Future of Healthcare
This change is consolidating the transition towards a more personalized, digital and efficient healthcare model, where artificial intelligence (AI) plays a key role. Its impact extends from medical diagnosis, facilitating the early detection of diseases and enabling more precise treatments tailored to each patient, to its integration into hospital management, optimizing resources, reducing waiting times and improving clinical decision-making through real-time data analysis.
The irruption of AI in the healthcare sector was one of the central themes of the Digital Health & Wellness Summit, organized by ECHAlliance-The Global Health Connector, which opened an interesting debate that pits two opposing perspectives against each other. On the one hand, AI is presented as a revolutionary tool, with multiple applications in healthcare thanks to its ability to process large volumes of data in seconds and detect patterns that would take humans years to identify. On the other, its progress poses the challenge of its regulation in key aspects such as privacy and patient safety, without slowing down the development of innovative solutions or generating excessive technological dependence.
The conclusions of the session ‘AI regulations around the globe: Developments and their impact on Digital Health’ underlined the importance of establishing a balanced framework that allows AI to deploy its full potential in the healthcare sector, ensuring the protection of patients. Rather than a brake, regulation acts as ‘a safety net’, said Ralph Ohyini Mbouna, Director of Digital Transformation and Services at Smart Africa.
Innovation and business opportunities in Africa, Asia and the USA were another of the topics addressed at the Digital Health&Wellness Summit. In this context, Gisela García-Álvarez, CEO of Lex Globalminds and strategic advisor to BIOIB, presented the Singapore model, highlighting its positioning strategy as a business center and gateway to Asia. Its firm commitment to innovation has turned this small Southeast Asian island into a pole of attraction for startups, technology multinationals and research centers, consolidating it as a global benchmark in the development of disruptive solutions.
Meetings and networking
The celebration of the Mobile World Congress 2025 gave BIOIB the opportunity to hold several strategic meetings, including with Catalonia.Heath. This health cluster, a member of the Alliance of Spanish Health Clusters (Acesabio), participated in a joint pavilion at 4YFN 2025 under the name ‘Catalonia Health Innovation Ecosystem’, bringing together the main players in health innovation in Catalonia and presenting its vision of the hospital of the future.
This initiative offers an innovative showcase of how healthcare will evolve in the coming years, a theme that has become increasingly relevant within the show. In fact, the president of 4YFN himself referred to healthcare as one of the key axes of this year’s event.
The BIOIB Cluster also learned about the non-invasive electrical brain stimulation technology developed by the company ‘Neuroelectrics’, by the Majorcan Ignacio Morales, Sales Manager. Morales explained that by measuring and modifying brain function it is possible to restore brain health, minimize disabilities and create a better life for patients.
Finally, BIOIB and the delegation of the Ministry of Health of the Balearic Islands Government, represented by Gema Jiménez, head of the Health Research Service, and Adrián Fernández, IB-Salut doctor specialized in AI, toured the fair together, visiting the most innovative proposals in digital health and exchanging views on the direction of the healthcare of the future.