DigiCare4You Consortium will jointly work with local stakeholders to deliver an intersectoral innovation involving digital tools for early screening, prevention and management of type 2 diabetes (T2D) and hypertension (HTN). An implementation study will be conducted, targeting more than 10,000 families in two Middle Income Countries (Albania and Bulgaria) and two High Income Countries (Greece and Spain), considering vulnerable groups. Schools will be used as an entry point to the community and building on an existing procedure for children’s periodic growth assessment (conducted via school nurses or in collaboration with local community health centres), parents/ caregivers will be screened via a non-invasive self-reported digital screening tool. Those identified at high risk for T2D will be referred for glycaemia testing and blood pressure (BP) measurements at local community health centres. Parents/ caregivers confirmed to have pre-diabetes or diabetes (and possibly high BP) will be invited to join a mHealth self-management intervention coordinated by the community healthcare workforce. The goal of this intervention is not only to improve the health status of the users, but also empower the entire family in adopting a healthy lifestyle. To this end, schools and communities will also be actively engaged to promote health literacy, well-being and support lifestyle changes creating a more supportive social and physical environment for the entire community. Regular monitoring will be ongoing during the implementation to allow corrective actions and ensure effective adaptation and uptake. Based on the study outcomes, the in-depth health economic evaluation and budget impact analysis, and data deriving from a Scalability Assessment and Decision-Support tool, national and international stakeholders will be invited to evaluate, through a series of webinars and workshops, the scalability potential of the DigiCare4You solution in other regions or countries in Europe.

The SABYDOMA programme addresses developments in the safety by design (SbD) paradigm by examining four industrial case studies in detail where the TRLs will advance from 4 to 6. Each TRL activity will progress from being lab based at TRL4 to being industry based at TRL6. The TRL4 activity will involve only innovation with regular industrial communication whereas the TRL6 activity will involve industrially located activities with innovation communication. One of the novel themes of this study is to use system control and optimisation theory including the Model Predictive Control (MPC) philosophy to bind the whole subject of SbD from laboratory innovation to the industrial production line and from decision making processes to project governance. An equally important innovative step is the building of high throughput online platforms where nanomaterial (NM) is manufactured and screened at the point of production. The screening signal controls the NM redesign and production in a feedback loop. Screens will involve (a) physiochemical sensing elements (b) in-vitro targets of increasing complexity from the 2D biomembrane to cell-line and more complex cell-line elements; and, (c) multiple in-vitro targets with multiple end-points; developed in current H2020 projects. Two of the industrial studies include composite coating manufacture where the coating’s stability and toxicity will be tested using a flow through microfluidic flow cell system coupled to online screens. This is part of the release and ageing investigations on the NM and NM coatings and the results of these will feed back to the production line design. At every step on the TRL ladder the in-silico modelling will be applied to optimise and redefine the relevant activities. By the same token regulatory and governance principles of SbD will be used to refine the technological development. The final deliverable will be four distinct technologies applying SbD to the four industrial processes respectively.

NanoSolveIT will introduce a ground-breaking in silico Integrated Approach to Testing and Assessment (IATA) for the environmental health and safety of Nanomaterials (NM), implemented as a decision support system packaged as a standalone open software and a Cloud platform. NanoSolveIT will develop and deliver: (i) a reliable user friendly knowledge-based infrastructure for data hosting, sharing and exploitation, (ii) NM fingerprints, sets of nanodescriptors and properties that can be predictively linked to NM functionality, exposure and hazard, thereby supporting NM grouping, safe-by-design (SbD) and regulatory risk assessment (RA), (iii) innovative methodologies for NMs predictive (eco)toxicology underpinned by artificial intelligence and state-of-the-art in silico techniques, and, (iv) integration with multi-scale modelling, RA and governance frameworks developed in EU H2020 funded and in the forthcoming NMBP-13 project(s). NanoSolveIT will deliver a validated, sustainable, multi-scale nanoinformatics IATA, tested and demonstrated at TLR6 via OECD style IATA case studies, serving the needs of diverse stakeholders at each stage of the NMs value chain, for assessment of potential adverse effects of NM on human health and the environment. NanoSolveIT is fully aligned to the objectives of the EU-US Nanoinformactics Roadmap, addressing all 13 of its short, medium and long term milestones, and supports the recommendations of the EMMC on standards for developing material modelling software and OECD best practice. The NanoSolveIT consortium (EU and international partners) is the only grouping capable of delivering the ambitious goals of the NMBP-14-2018 call, since they have collectively driven most of the current progress in nanoinformatics: 81% of the nanoinormatics papers cited in the EU-US nanoinformatics roadmap had NanoSolveIT authors. NanoSolveIT will integrate across the consortium-wide modelling approaches to provide the IATA platform for in silico NMs RA.

The focus of the project is supporting educators and providing continuous professional development to VET teachers, trainers and mentors.The context for the project is the overwhelming need for professional development in the area of concussion awareness training and management for VET teachers involved in programmes related to health, medical and sport and exercise. Concussion is not currently taught in any kind of detail to the very professionals that will end up encountering it contributing to a significant knowledge gap in terms of understanding and management of concussion on a broader European and global scale. The consortium is comprised of six partners; Letterkenny Institute of Technology (Ireland), the International Concussion and Head Injury Research Foundation (UK), Oxford Brookes University (UK), the University of Southern Denmark (Denmark), La Trobe University (Australia) and Galway-Mayo Institute of Technology (Ireland). Each member of the consortium brings a unique expertise to ensure a complementary partnership that will enable the successful completion of the project.Addressing current and misinformation around the mechanisms, duration, awareness, treatment and complexity of the ‘invisible injury’, this project is the first step to developing a combined continental approach to cataloguing, educating and quantifying the issue of concussion in a recreation and sporting context. This lack of training and awareness of concussion means that future sports personnel and health professionals will be ill equipped to diagnose and treat concussions that they will undoubtedly be faced with on numerous occasions throughout their careers. A lack of understanding of concussion leads to fear and many individuals turning away from sport and physical activity due to misinformation.The overall aim of this highly innovative project is to develop an in depth understanding of the definition and implications of concussion in a sport and exercise setting by equipping VET educators with an innovative pedagogy guide (O2), informed by the findings of a systematic literature review (O1) and module (O3) that will provide them with the knowledge and materials to develop concussion specific training that will be influenced by health professionals and experts in the field. The main objectives of this landmark project are;-to upskill VET educators (target group) in the area of concussion in training, awareness and management and to empower them with the tools to incorporate this type of concussion-specific-training into their programmes-to dissipate the uncertainty and fear surrounding concussion in contact sports by making resources, current research and information available to the public via the online Module (O3). The project team believe that by informing society on concussion in sports they would expect to see a decrease in misinformation and an increase in the amount of people engaging with sport and recreational activity thus contributing to a healthier population.The project methodology and activities have been designed to specifically meet the needs identified in our target group (VET providers). Two LTTAs are scheduled to ensure the design, content and functionality of the project outputs are relevant for the intended audience. Three multiplier events are planned to ensure wide dissemination of the project outcomes and outputs. Between the different activities approximately 500 particpants will be directly involved but the wider dissemination is anticipated to reach over 100,000.Due to the breadth of the project, the project outputs will automatically be applicable to a large scope of local, national, international stakeholders and have an impact across boundaries due to the cumulative outputs and projected impacts with the project. From an international perspective, WHO (2018) indicate that implementation of both the EU Physical activity guidelines and the Physical Activity Strategy of the WHO has progressed. Most countries reported data from national systems for monitoring and surveillance of physical activity, but the knowledge gap appears where there is minimal tracking of injury incidence from member states following this increase in physical activity. This point is particularly pertinent as while we may have an increased involvement across the continent, we still have no recorded surveillance data of the type and frequency of injury rates. In summary the project is a multi-national and multi-disciplinary approach to developing educational materials for VET providers focussed on the area of concussion education and awareness. The project will develop three key outputs, which will have a cascading effect on the professional development of VET providers and will ultimately lead to better training to support those that may encounter concussion-related injuries in their future careers.

Healthcare relies on medical devices, yet often these have significant risk of infection and failure. The medical device market is estimated to be just under US$500 billion, while US$25 billion is spent annually on treatment of chronic wounds. As our populations becomes older, our healthcare systems are also becoming stressed by multi-antibiotic resistance and viral outbreaks. For example, 50% of initial COVID-19 fatalities were due to secondary bacterial infections [Zhou et al. The Lancet, 2020]. Medical device failure rates of up to 20% burden our health service disproportionately through device centred infection, immune rejection, or both. The biomaterials that devices and external wound care products are made from significantly influence immune and healing responses and affect the outcome of infection. In the EPSRC Programme Grant "Next Generation Biomaterials Discovery", physical surface patterns (topographies) combined with novel polymers were found which both reduce bacterial biofilm formation and increase the immune acceptance of materials in vitro and in vivo in preclinical infection models. This provides a new paradigm for biomaterials used as implants and wound care products, where novel polymers can be topographically patterned to improved healing and acceptance using bio-instruction. To exploit these findings requires targeting to specific medical device environments and elucidation of the mechanism of action for translation by industry. This project will utilise 3D printing to manufacture ChemoTopoChips containing over a thousand polymer chemistry-topography combinations that allow the possible design space to be efficiently explored and mapped using semi-automated in-vitro measurements of host immune cell and infecting pathogen interactions individually and in co-culture. These ChemoTopoChips will allow a very high content of molecular information to be extracted from biomolecules secreted into the culture media (the secretome), those adsorbed to the surface (the biointerface) and their impact on both host cells and bacteria. The same fabrication approaches will be used to make devices for preclinical testing; in vivo information will be maximised using minimally invasive monitoring of infection and healing over time and detailed analysis of explants. These information streams will be merged using artificial intelligence (specifically machine learning) to build effective models of performance and provide mechanistic insight, allowing design of materials ready for translation as medical devices outside this project. After consultation with a wide range of clinicians we have chosen to target the following two devices: -Wound care products for chronic/non-healing wounds: dressings to reduce infection, induce immune-homeostasis and promote healing in chronic wounds that result in 7000 diabetes related amputations in the UK per year and cost the NHS £1bn a year to manage. -Implants requiring tissue integration but prone to fibrosis/adhesion and biofilm-associated infection: surgical meshes used for repair of hernias or pelvic organ prolapse commonly afflicting women after childbirth. The NHS undertakes 100k such operation each year with infection rates of up to 10%, plus foreign body response complications. The team assembled to exploit this opportunity has unique experience in the areas of biomaterials, artificial intelligence, additive manufacturing and in vitro and in vivo measurements of immune and bacterial responses to biomaterials. Facilities including the recently opened £100m Nottingham Biodiscovery Institute, the recently funded EPSRC £1m suite of high resolution/high throughput 3D printers and the unique £2.5m 3DOrbiSIMS Cat2 cryo-facility. These investments in Nottingham make this the only location in the world that is capable of undertaking this project. An Advisory Board of clinicians, industrial partners and leading academics will meet annually to provide input to the project.