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.

Persons with a disorder of consciousness (DOC) have little or no ability to interact with people and devices. They are unable to control voluntary movement, and hence they cannot speak, blink, use devices for communication, or otherwise convey their needs and desires. Recent work from our group and others has shown that new methods and devices based on real-time EEG can help re-assess DOC patients’ cognitive functions and provide basic communication for them. Other work found that new tools to noninvasively monitor and stimulate brain activity could substantially improve recovery of persons with stroke or other disabilities. EEG data can detect each patient’s motor imagery and thereby influence multimodal feedback in real-time. This feedback may include VR avatars, functional electrical stimulation, and potentially even magnetic or electrical stimulation of motor areas of the cortex. This promising new research direction requires extensive collaboration across disciplines and sectors, and experienced researchers (ERs) with relevant experience. We will capitalize on our progress in both communicating with DOC patients and our new system for rehabilitation to get the project started quickly. The project will explore to create a new system that will be used to collect data with DOC patients. We will analyze the resulting data to develop new knowledge and contribute to improved tools that therapists and physicians can use. DOC-Stim includes extensive dissemination and communication activities to convey our project results to numerous audiences. The varied training activities will supplement the ER’s training-by-research to help prepare him for a high-impact career working across industrial, academic, and medical sectors. DOC-Stim will help position the ER for a leadership position in a rapidly growing new field while fostering technologies that could help restore movement for people who currently have little hope.