We put our lives increasingly in the hands of smart complex systems making decisions that directly affect our health and wellbeing. This is very evident in healthcare - where systems watch over your health - as well as in traffic - where autonomous driving solutions are gradually taking over control of the car. The accuracy and timeliness of the decisions depend on the systems’ ability to build a good understanding of both you and your environment, which relies on observations and the ability to reason on them. This project will bring perception sensing technologies like Radar, LiDAR and Time of Flight cameras to the next level, enhancing their features to allow for more accurate detection of human behaviour and physiological parameters. Besides more accurate automotive solutions ensuring driver vigilance and pedestrian and cyclist safety, this innovation will open up new opportunities in health and wellbeing to monitor elderly people at home or unobtrusively assess health state. To facilitate building the complex smart sensing systems envisioned and ensure their secure and reliable operation, the new Distributed Intelligence paradigm will be embraced, enhanced and supported by tools. It leverages the advantages of Edge and Cloud computing, building on the distributed computational resources increasingly available in sensors and edge components to distribute also the intelligence. The goal of this project is to develop next generation smart perception sensors and enhance the distributed intelligence paradigm to build versatile, secure, reliable, and proactive human monitoring solutions for the health, wellbeing, and automotive domains The project brings together major industrial players and research partners to address top challenges in health, wellbeing, and automotive domains through three use cases: integral vitality monitoring for elderly and exercise, driver monitoring, and providing safety and comfort for vulnerable road users at intersections.

The ageing population and related increase in chronic diseases put considerable pressure on both the healthcare system and the society, resulting in an unsustainable rise of healthcare costs. As a result there is an urgent need to improve efficiency of care and reduce hospitalisation time in order to control cost and increase quality of life. Addressing this need, medical applications need to become less invasive and improve disease detection, diagnosis and treatment using advanced imaging and sensing techniques. ASTONISH will deliver breakthrough imaging and sensing technologies for monitoring, diagnosis and treatment applications by developing smart optical imaging technology that extends the use of minimally invasive diagnosis and treatment and allows for unobtrusive health monitoring. The project will integrate miniaturized optical components, data processing units and SW applications into smart imaging systems that are less obtrusive, cheaper, more reliable and easier to use than state of the art systems. This results into 6 demonstrators by which the technologies will be validated and which allow for pre-clinical testing in the scope of the project. The overall concept within ASTONISH builds on the development and application of common imaging/sensing technologies. Smart algorithms, multimodal fusion techniques and biomedical signal processing will process the acquired data and advanced user interfaces will simplify the complex clinical tasks. These technology components will be integrated to build application specific solutions for physiological signs monitoring, tumour detection, minimally invasive surgery, brain function monitoring and rehabilitation. The ASTONISH partners cover the full value chain, from semiconductor manufacturing to clinical centres testing the final application. The proposed innovations improve the global competitiveness of the European industry in the healthcare domain.

With the growing medical possibilities, new questions arise. It is not only a matter of being able to treat, but also of considering the added value of treatment. In deciding the value of treatment, many factors have to be weighed, such as health benefit, quality of life effect and expenses. Guidelines are directive in making such treatment decisions. As such, medical guidelines have a considerable influence on the quality and effectiveness of healthcare and allow the (future) healthcare professional to be as cost-conscious as possible, especially as the role of specialists in cost conscious care is thought to have become more prominent (needs analysis by the CoCoCARE consortium). However, despite the importance of medical guidelines for cost-effective healthcare, there is little educational attention for it in regular medical training programmes. On a European level, training is dispersed in terms of content and geography. Additionally, the educational programmes that are available have limited focus on competence development, whereas guideline development and the effective implementation thereof relies heavily on a broad range of competences (CanMEDS). Therefore, teaching guideline development offers the opportunity to develop these general competences that are essential in daily practice, also when not developing guidelines. In order to fill the educational gap on guidelines and competences, this project aims to develop a state-of-the-art educational programme to be used for medical residents across Europe. The objective of the project is two-fold: 1) teaching specialists to develop and implement high quality, evidence-based guidelines and; 2) equip specialists with the competences and teach them to be more cost conscious. These objectives will be achieved by a highly integrated, international blended learning programme for medical specialists in training. The programme combines e-learning, plenary discussions and workshops, self-study and practical training from an innovative holistic approach. The content of the programme will also be comprehensive and integrated as it covers all steps that are crucial in developing medical guidelines. In order to do so it will cover the following topics: - PATIENT-CENTERED ASSESSMENT: Patient experiences are weighed. In order to do this, specialists will be taught to identify knowledge gaps and define corresponding questions. Moreover, inclusion and exclusion criteria will be defined. (>IO1)- EVIDENCE REVIEW: Participants should be taught how to properly collect, interpret, combine and evaluate evidence. (>IO2)- COST CONSCIOUS CARE. In order to be able to compare treatment options on their cost effectiveness participants should be taught to interpret changes in costs and (health) benefits of treatments. This includes estimations of long-term benefits, in terms of health outcome, health related quality of life and cost savings. (>IO3)- IMPLEMENTATION IN PRACTICE. Medical residents will learn to assess feasibility of practical implementation and will develop the skills to design an implementation strategy. (>IO4)Moreover, the CoCoCARE project will deliver an EDUCATION SUPPORT TOOLBOX (>IO5). The topics within the educational modules will have to be presented with a didactical approach that enhances learning and ensures usage of the knowledge and skills. This demands a highly integrated approach. A toolbox will offer all the needed tools, such as portals for communication among trainees and with trainers. The toolbox will also include instructions on the use of al educational materials. This will ensure the optimal learning experience and effectiveness. In CoCoCARE the described training programme and the necessary tools and materials will be developed. Moreover, they will be piloted in two subsequent rounds to enable evaluation, revision and optimisation in an iterative process. The first pilot will be run at the partner institutes (C1A1), the second also at the associate partners to enhance geographical spread, number of residents and overall impact (C1A2). In total at least 40 participants will be enrolled in the programme during this project. On the long run, much larger numbers of participants will be reached. However, not only the participants will benefit from the project. As a results of the learning process of the participants, guidelines and thus care will improve. This will have a positive effect on medical professionals as well as patients. The medical professionals will benefit from better guidelines because they will streamline and standardise the work, whereas the patients will benefit from optimal care thanks to the evidence-based reviews of treatment effectivity. Last but not least, the training programme will support medical professionals in making cost conscious decisions. In the age of ever-increasing healthcare expenses, managing healthcare costs is more important than ever.