Improving the managing of solutions for people with dementia and frailty
This project will facilitate care service providers in designing and deploying personalized, integrated care prevention and intervention measures against dementia and frailty towards significantly and evidently improving the individuals’ wellbeing and quality of life.
COMFORTAGE is 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), Digital Innovation Hubs (DIHs) and Living Labs (LLs) to establish a pan European framework for Community-based, Integrated and People-Centric prevention, monitoring and progression managing solutions for dementia and frailty. This project will facilitate care service providers in designing and deploying personalized, integrated care prevention and intervention measures against dementia and frailty towards significantly and evidently improving the individuals’ wellbeing and quality of life (QoL).
Prof. Dr. Willem-Jan van den Heuvel is delighted to be involved in this project as it will provide the means and tools for the empowerment and enhancement of all stakeholders’ health and digital literacy to further reduce health inequalities in modern communities and to support healthy and active age-living. In that context, the project’s framework will be validated and evaluated in thirteen pilot studies involving diverse stakeholders at eight EU member states and will be empowered by a unique combination and integration of:
(i) Medical/clinical innovations (e.g. leverage and analysis of longitudinal studies, cohorts, and biobanks, novel approaches to risk factor analysis and personalized prediction, AI-based medical devices, integrated data sources of age-related clinical evidence, and evidence-based HTA),
(ii) Cutting edge AI innovations (e.g., explainable AI (XAI), secure AI, behavioral changing applications, serious games, Patient Digital Twins PDTs), Virtual Assistive technologies) for trusted, accurate, secure and personalized clinical decision making,
(iii) DIHs (e.g. Smart Homes, LLs, Robotics and Ambient Sensors) to facilitate and promote research activities in the health and well-being 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 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). The project will create a first of a kind Virtualized AI-Based Healthcare Platform (VHP) that will centralize access to project’s AI resources for risk factor analysis, early diagnosis and personalized decision making for age-related mental and physical diseases and disorders.
The platform will enable the integration, consolidation and sharing of assets for AI-driven diagnostics and clinical decision making, including datasets, analytical models for personalized prevention and intervention, AI/ML algorithms and advanced AI tools (e.g., XAI, Serious Games, PDTs). This platform will also provide a people-centric hybrid Training and Educational Toolkit (TET) to increase self-management and empowerment of older adults regarding their mental and physical health condition. Through access to the resources and tools of the platform, all relevant stakeholders (i.e., HCPs, care providers, social scientists, and policy makers) will be able to collaborate and integrate, resulting in increased engagement in, and adherence to, effective strategies for health promotion, disease prevention and treatment, while digital literacy inequalities will be minimized. The VHP of the project will also be the main vehicle for the exploitation and sustainability of the project’s results.
Finally, COMFORTAGE will build an ecosystem of clinicians, hospitals, care services providers, large-scale multipliers, social scientists, and other healthcare stakeholders around the project’s results, while at the same time establishing viable business models for its sustainability and wider use.
