UBITECH participates at the kick-off meeting hosted by UPRC (January 16-18, 2024) in Athens, Greece of the COMFORTAGE Research and Innovation Action, officially started on January 1st, 2024. The project is funded by the European Commission (Grant Agreement No. 101137301) and spans on the period January 2024 – December 2027. The COMFORTAGE action constitutes a joint effort of medical experts (i.e., neurologists, psychiatrists, neuropsychologists, nurses, memory clinics), social scientists and humanists, technical experts (i.e., data scientists, AI experts, robotic experts) and Digital Innovation Hubs to establish a pan European framework for Community-based, Integrated and People-Centric prevention, monitoring and progression managing solutions for age-related diseases and disabilities.
The project’s framework will be empowered by a unique combination and integration of: (i) Medical/clinical innovations (e.g., novel approaches to risk factor analysis and personalized prediction, AI-based medical devices, integrated data sources of age-related clinical evidence, and evidence-based Healthcare Technology Assessment (HTA)), (ii) Cutting edge AI innovations (e.g., explainable AI (XAI), secure AI, serious games, Patient Digital Twins, Virtual Assistive technologies) for trusted, accurate, secure and personalized clinical decision making, (iii) Digital Innovation Hubs (e.g. Smart Homes, robotics and Living Labs) to facilitate and promote research activities in the health and wellbeing domain, and (iv) social innovations for promoting innovative views and co-creating new or improved solutions for assistance and improvement of social integration and interaction.
COMFORTAGE will facilitate the integration, harmonization, and management of a host of different data sources, including biobanks, cohorts, medical records, longitudinal observational studies, real-world data about patients, as well of alternative secondary data sources, such as sensors, wearables and mobiles in a standardized structure called Holistic Health Records (HHRs). COMFORTAGE will become a catalyst to help prevent, monitor, and manage progression of age-related diseases and disabilities, especially of dementia and frailty, based on high-end research and analysis of the utilization of the aforementioned technologies.
Within COMFORTAGE, UBITECH will drive the delivery of the mechanisms that realise the concept of personalised and integrated Holistic Health Records (HHR), as well the key infrastructures (i.e., Blockchain, IKBs) and AI tools for the further utilization of the processed data. In particular, UBITECH will specify and implement the infrastructure required for the project’s ageing data space (i.e. Ageing-EHDS Infrastructure and Connectors). Specifically, this work will focus on the specification and implementation of an identify management infrastructure (e.g., based on KeyCloak), data models and ontologies for dementia and frailty related data, as well as connectors for contributing and consuming data to/from the data space. The work will be driven by the project’s DHRM and the implementation will be compliant to Reference Model of the IDSA and fully aligned to EHDS’s specifications. Interfaces and touch points for the integration to the wider EHDS will be specified as well.
In addition, UBITECH will select, develop, and validate a range of AI algorithms for dementia and frailty prediction, prevention and delay of progression. The algorithms will include traditional ML techniques, Deep Learning algorithms (e.g., for medical imaging) and reinforcement learning (e.g., for identifying patients’ phenotypes). UBITECH will also implement an Integrated Care Model Library where the implemented models are stored and that offers relevant APIs to support the continuous enrichment/adaptation of development models based on the availability and analysis of more (risk, predictions, feedback) data.
