The ehcoBUTLER Idea: Nowadays, it is a fact that Europe is ageing. A common characteristic of elders is the frequent occurrence of either physical or mild cognitive impairments. This situation brings new challenges in how to improve the independence and quality of life of elderly people and promote their good health in different ways. The ehcoBUTLER project addresses this challenge by developing an ICT technological platform with both leisure and care apps. The main objective of ehcoBUTLER is to demonstrate the socio-economic benefits from the deployment of several innovative and user led ICT pilot projects based on different business models in order to be able to translate promising results into scalable practice across Europe. How the objectives will be achieved: The ehcoBUTLER Consortium is composed by a multidisciplinary combination of specialist partners on their areas and responsibilities, in order to satisfy the requirements emerging from the EU Call and the particular PHC-20 topic. With this consortium we expect to contribute to break the technological barrier that exists nowadays between the elderly and the ICTs, encouraging the e-Inclusion, to facilitate psychological and cognitive techniques and support procedures, both for the elderly people and for the informal and formal caregivers, to develop an interoperable and open ICT platform particularly designed and adapted to elderly people, to demonstrate the ROI from several four business models based on the deployment of this ICT platform and to generate an ecosystem for apps provider that will allow end users to integrate all the leisure and care related activities in just one platform. To ensure that the platform can be scaled to an operational deployment in the European Market we will deploy ehcoBUTLER in 5 countries and 7 pilot sites to reach the higher number of users and to test the suitability of ehcoBUTLER in different but related business cases.

The traditional cloud centric IoT has clear limitations, e.g. unreliable connectivity, privacy concerns, or high round-trip times. IntellIoT overcomes these challenges in order to enable NG IoT applications. IntellIoT’s objectives aim at developing a framework for intelligent IoT environments that execute semi-autonomous IoT applications, which evolve by keeping the human-in-the-loop as an integral part of the system. Such intelligent IoT environments enable a suite of novel use cases. IntellIoT focuses on: Agriculture, where a tractor is semi-autonomously operated in conjunction with drones. Healthcare, where patients are monitored by sensors to receive advice and interventions from virtual advisors. Manufacturing, where highly automated plants are shared by multiple tenants who utilize machinery from third-party vendors. In all cases a human expert plays a key role in controlling and teaching the AI-enabled systems. The following 3 key features of IntellIoT’s approach are highly relevant for the work programme as they address the call’s challenges: (1) Human-defined autonomy is established through distributed AI running on intelligent IoT devices under resource-constraints, while users teach and refine the AI via tactile interaction (with AR/VR). (2) De-centralised, semi-autonomous IoT applications are enabled by self-aware agents of a hypermedia-based multi-agent system, defining a novel architecture for the NG IoT. It copes with interoperability by relying on W3C WoT standards and enabling automatic resolution of incompatibility constraints. (3) An efficient, reliable computation & communication infrastructure is powered by 5G and dynamically manages and optimizes the usage of network and compute resources in a closed loop. Integrated security assurance mechanisms provide trust and DLTs are made accessible under resource constraints to enable smart contracts and show transparency of performed actions.

Healthy ageing along with independent living have become key challenges for Europe as countries are experiencing growth in the number of older persons in their population. Several international organisations have stressed the importance of the independence, participation and autonomy of older people to remain healthy and, consequently, to ensure their quality of life. VALUECARE will deliver efficient outcome-based integrated (health and social) care to older people facing cognitive impairment, frailty and multiple chronic health conditions in order to improve their quality of life (and of their families) as well as the sustainability of the health and social care systems in Europe. It will also take into account the job satisfaction and the wellbeing of the health and social service providers, thus moving from the “Triple” to the “Quadruple Aim”. The project’s vision of integrated value-based care will be supported by a robust, secure and scalable digital solution that will be tested and evaluated in 7 large-scale pilots in Europe following a sound methodology developed by the project partners together with the end-users. VALUECARE proposes greater efficiency in the use of resources and coordination of care in a setting that ensures trust of users and policy makers about data access, protection and sharing and standardisation that can be replicated in EU. The consortium, made up of 17 partners from 8 EU countries, led by the Erasmus Medical Centre, has been built to guarantee the full coverage of the scientific, technological, clinical and social competencies, and to gather the viewpoint of different actors necessary to develop, test and evaluate the concepts, paradigms, protocols and interventions related to VALUECARE. The project’s multidisciplinary consortium includes stakeholders from the whole supply chain of the digital health and social care environment in order to maximize its chances of success.