Testing and Experimentation Facility for Health

Outcomes and deliverables

The TEF will foster the integration of state-of-the-art AI and robotics technologies in the healthcare domain. It will boost European healthcare industry by focusing on the applicability and facilitate the complex and lengthy process of AI innovation. The project will contribute to positioning the EU as a leader in AI and robotics for healthcare by promoting the generation of new companies, retaining talent, and creating new jobs. Expected outcomes include:

• Validation in real conditions of innovative AI and robotics technologies in healthcare applications,
• Efficiency and safety of treatments,
• Improved operational and clinical workflows,
• Better clinical outcomes,
• Enhanced patient experience,
• Enhanced professional experiences, including education and training opportunities,
• Acceleration of the adoption of AI and robotics technologies in the healthcare sector,
• Innovation capacity and competitiveness improvement in the European healthcare sector,
• Better compliance with relevant regulations that govern the marketing authorisation of healthcare products,
• Improved ageing environment.

Contribution to AI innovation:

• Boosting the competitiveness of the European industry, including SMEs in AI, a technology of high strategic relevance;
• Contributing to boost European IP and products based on European technology;
• Creation of world-class experimentation facilities in Europe, offering a comprehensive support combining the necessary expertise, meeting the needs of European innovators. The organisations running the TEFs and their process will ensure the highest level of trust and security for the users of the TEFs, and highest quality of the testing and validation to guarantee trust and security in the tested solutions, key for their broad diffusion;
• Contributing to European digital sovereignty and open strategic autonomy in AI, and AI-enabled solutions.

The demand for high-quality health and care by European citizens is increasing. At the same time, there is an urgent need for cost-effectiveness in the context of an ageing society and growing numbers of chronically ill patients. Technologies based on Artificial Intelligence (AI) and robotics have the potential to improve the efficiency, security, and quality of the prevention, detection, diagnosis, treatment, care, rehabilitation and monitoring of European citizens’ health, as well as to promote a healthy lifestyle. The awarded project will develop the Testing and Experimentation Facility (TEF) with a focus on full integration, testing and validation of advanced AI-based technologies (e.g. IoT, MedIoT, Active and Assisted Living Technologies) and robotics technologies for health and care. The crucial need for a such facility was made obvious during the COVID-19 crisis, as many potential solutions to address the current needs were already prototyped or tested in labs but could not be deployed in emergency situations because of the lack of testing in real-life environments and the lack of certification. The objectives of the TEF are to accelerate the testing by mutualising the infrastructures as well the administrative, medical and ethical procedures and certifications as well as to advance personalised medicine and person-centred care, with the aim to increase the effectiveness, resilience and sustainability of European health and care systems and reduce healthcare delivery inequalities in Europe, while ensuring compliance with relevant legal, ethical, quality and interoperability requirements.

The TEF will operate as a multidisciplinary setting having a common collaboration framework. It will provide physical and digital access to large resources and will offer support, research partners, clinical expertise, expertise in AI and robotics, data, training and access to high-performance computing. It should be close to where health and care services are provided but also cover multiple health and care processes within the realm of research, innovation and regulation (hospitals, health and care centres, universities, RTOs, innovation ecosystems - like incubators, clusters, accelerators, public health or certification agencies, healthcare companies of any sizes when relevant). The TEF will gather researchers, medical and clinical professionals, patients, industrial developers, innovators and end-users, and they may include regulatory sandboxes. This facility could be centralised or distributed across several locations around a central node in order to reflect the sector diversity, and possibly support some remote operations.

Activities supported by this scheme will cover the demonstration, testing and validation in real-life application environment, possibly with real patients, but also ethical and data protection reviews, certification, market analysis, IP protection, incubation and business development, as well as the contribution to the regulation and standardization effort, when relevant. The infrastructure established within this facility will include both the hardware (e.g. robots, high-performance computers, 3D printing, IoT) and the software, including trusted and secured access to data, necessary to provide the different services. Links to the data space for health should be established, when necessary. The project is encouraged to collaborate with other relevant Digital Europe Programme projects, in particular the edge AI and other sectorial Testing and Experimentation Facilities, to ensure appropriate synergies. The project should allow for large-scale in-silico, in vitro, ex-vivo and in vivo testing, when relevant. Links should be made to existing structures and networks as appropriate.

The facility may include a range of use cases in different fields such as:

• Treatments in various fields including cancer and paediatrics;
• Monitoring the progress of long‑term conditions in function of treatment (e.g. diabetes mellitus, neurodegenerative diseases etc.);
• Support to doctors’ decision-making, including personalised, predictive and gender-sensitive treatments;
• Detection of tumours from imaging;
• Robotics surgery;
• Robotics assistance and rehabilitation;
• Active and Assisted Living technologies for elderly or disabled persons, including digital solutions in support of the creation of multi-generation living spaces in line with the New European Bauhaus approach^[1];
• Logistics, management of flows and process efficiency in hospitals.

[1]https://europa.eu/new-european-bauhaus/index_en