is professor for Biomedical Engineering at Ulm University since May 2021. He is the director of the Institute of Biomedical Engineering in the Faculty of Engineering, Computer Science and Psychology.  From July 2022 to October 2024 he was the acting chair of the Institute of Information Resource Management.

He was a Swiss National Science Foundation professor at the Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule Zürich (ETH Zürich) in the Department of Health Sciences and Technology from 2014 to 2020 where he founded and directed the Mobile Health Systems Laboratory. Between 2005 and 2014, he held research positions at the Biomedical Engineering Research Group of the Department of Mechanical and Mechatronics Engineering at the University of Stellenbosch, South Africa; the pediatric anesthesia research group of BC Children's Hospital and Child and Family Research Institute (CFRI);  the Electrical and Computer Engineering in Medicine Research Group of the University of British Columbia (UBC) in Vancouver, Canada;  and the Laboratory of Intelligent Systems at Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), Switzerland.
Walter Karlen holds a Master degree in micro-engineering from EPFL and a Docteur ès sciences (PhD) in Computer, Communication and Information Sciences (also EPFL). 

Prof. Karlen was an awardee of the Rising Stars in Global Health program of Grand Challenges Canada. In 2013, he was awarded the Dorothy J. Killam Memorial Postdoctoral Prize for his accomplishments at UBC involving the research on biomedical sensors for global health. He is a Senior Member of the IEEE EMBC society. Prof. Karlen co-directs the Hochschulmedizin Zürich flagship project SleepLoop, a consortia that aims to develop and validate novel technologies for improving sleep and prevent sleep related disease.  

Research Goals and Interests

Prof. Karlen’s objective is to enable the diagnosis, monitoring, and treatment of major global health burdens by developing personalized methods, intelligent devices, and efficient systems that can be used at the point-of-care. His research focuses on the technical aspects of mobile health and point-of-care devices such as real-time biomedical signal processing, mobile computing, sensors and systems design, and quality control. He also works on the improvement of clinical decision support with the design of adaptive systems, smart alarms, and optimized user-machine interaction.