Below, you find a brief overview of some projects with SMIT involvement that were launched during September 2021 and January 2022.
Scaling EUROpean citizen driven transferable and transformative digital health (SEURO)
Most models of care across the EU focus on a single disease approach and are not adaptive to the needs of people with multiple chronic conditions. People with multimorbidity and healthcare professionals often report their current care as repetitive, poorly integrated and inconvenient. SEURO aims to improve this situation by optimising and scaling up use of the digital health platform ProACT for use across EU countries.
With more than 50 million people living with multimorbidity in Europe, a key aim of SEURO is to help them to proactively self-manage their diseases through digital technologies and increase the efficiency of health systems. SEURO will use the ProACT platform, which was developed to facilitate individuals over 65 living at home with chronic/multimorbid diseases to better understand and manage their own health and well-being independently. SEURO will analyse key evidence to support European organisations, at local and regional levels, to successfully scale, implement and transfer the ProACT platform (developed and tested in Horizon 2020, PHC-25-2015).
Concrete actions
The SEURO project will scale up the ProACT platform using effectiveness implementation hybrid trials with a sample of 720 older people with multimorbidity and members of their care network (in Ireland, Belgium, and Sweden) to measure the effectiveness of the platform. Participants will have at least one of the following conditions: cardiovascular disease (excluding stroke), COPD and diabetes. An additional inductive simultaneous exploratory trial will be co-ordinated in Italy to evaluate the purchasing process by health service providers aiming to implement the ProACT platform.
In addition to trialling the ProACT platform across Ireland, Belgium, Sweden and Italy, the SEURO project will also develop three novel tools to guide the implementation and evaluation of new digital solutions. These tools will include: a self-assessment tool to explore the transferability of a digital solution (ProTransfer); a checklist tool to identify key areas to consider when developing and evaluating a digital health behavioural change intervention (ProBCF-C); and an artificial intelligence prediction model (ProInsight) to assess the impact of a solution on healthcare system performance.
Timeline
May 2021 – May 2024
More information
Check the website: seuro2020.eu , or sign up for the SEURO newsletter to stay up to date: https://bit.ly/3n0S6ac
SolidLab
imec has announced the establishment of the interuniversity collaboration SolidLab Flanders. imec researchers at various Flemish universities, including SMIT, will in the next four years work on technological, social, and applied research on the development of decentralised data vaults as the building block of an innovative data-driven economy in Flanders.
More information
Check the news item on VUB today.
[Photo by Brands&People on Unsplash]