The Central Denmark Region and EU have granted DKK 37.5 million to a 4-year IT effort within pervasive healthcare, ensuring the shortest way between research, implementation and business.

Caretech Innovation will initiate a number of new projects, the aim of which is to create innovative IT solutions in the healthcare sector in the region as well as in the rest of the country and abroad. All projects will have a clear commercial perspective as well as a high international research level. Furthermore, focus in on user-driven innovation.

Caretech Innovation is operated by the Alexandra Institute and is embedded in the Center for Pervasive Healthcare. The chairman of the board is Erik Stridbæk, former Director, CTO & VP , and the day-to-day management consists of Director, Morten Kyng, Professor at the Dept. of Computer Science, Aarhus University and Lone Faber, Head of Research and Innovation (Pervasive Healthcare Lab), the Alexandra Institute.

For more information on Caretech Innovation, please contact us at kontakt@caretechinnovation.dk or see www.caretechinnovation.dk

The project started January 1st, 2010 and for the next four years it is meant to identify and develop open technical standards with a primary focus on ICT-based solutions targeted for the home and workplace. This applies, at first, to the sensors, robots, handheld devices and other wireless technologies developed as part of the overall development of welfare technologies for chronic patients.

Current telemedicine related projects within the social and health professional area develop their own ad-hoc infrastructure solutions. They do this; because there are no widely adopted solutions for, e.g. connectivity, identification and login, secure communications, automatic switching between networks, data formats and the integration with various electronic records.

The project aims to change this by providing a basis for an open technical infrastructure that will support the development of secure, scalable ICT-based social and health services. An infrastructure that is an extension of and complement to existing infrastructures and standards, e.g. Sundhedsdatanettet, the National Service Platform and the national programme for telemedicine and home monitoring.

The project's primary target group is companies developing communicative systems and products for chronic patients. The project will generate recommendations and standards providing a technical basis that allow ICT-based health and social products to communicate with each other and with other ICT solutions in the home, in hospitals, with GPs, etc.

The long-term objective of the project is a national wide infrastructure and given the project's recommendations and standards such national infrastructure, that is, the crosscutting infrastructural solutions, could be developed. The actors responsible for this development thus constitute the project's secondary audience. These solutions are to be made available to the individual telemedicine projects and thus dramatically reduce both the complexity as development costs for individual product.

Connect2Care is a cross-cutting project, which is part of and working with four pilot projects under the UNIK Consortium (Use of New Technology in Innovative Solutions for Chronic Patients). The UNIK consortium is granted by the Council for Technology and Innovation as a result on a tender on Innovative Social Solutions in Strategic Partnerships. The pilot projects have focused on four chronic diseases: heart patients, diabetics, COPD patients and patients with muscular skeletal disorders.

Internet of Things Initiative

The IoT Initiative is a coordinated action on that will support the development of the European IoT community for the next years.

The Internet of Things (IoT) is one of the most important areas of a Future Internet with high potential to positively impact European economy and society.

The IoT initiative (IoT-i), an EU Framework Programme 7 project, started in September 2010, brings together key actors from all relevant but currently fragmented IoT communities in Europe to work jointly towards a common vision of the Internet of Things. It represents the first serious attempt in building a unified IoT community in Europe, going across boundaries of disparate technology sectors, in order to create a joint European strategic vision of the Internet of Things and aligning this vision with the current developments on the Future Internet.

IoT-i pursues the achievement of the following strategic objectives:

1. Creating a joint strategic and technical vision for the IoT in Europe that encompasses the currently fragmented sectors of the IoT domain holistically.
2. Contribute to the creation of an economically sustainable and socially acceptable environment in Europe for IoT technologies and respective R&D activities.
3. Creating an environment that favours international adoption of European IoT technology.

Net4Care

The outcome of the Net4Care project is meant to accelerate the development and delivery of scalable and affordable health services as well as to create a new market for (infrastructure) modules for such services. The project will generate new and improved business potentials for private companies through their (new) products and services that help to create greater value for healthcare and the patient/citizen.

Net4Care will furthermore develop a series of models with a set of architectures and interfaces for telemedicine solutions and general models for ICT-supported organization across existing departments, hospitals and industries. These models will support businesses, hospitals and regions to effectively develop, implement and operate new telemedicine solutions.

The private companies will, in cooperation with Net4Care, also work on developing advice related to general integration on both a technical and organizational level, a national health service webshop, health app's to the webshop, and a “support company” focusing on technical as well as health related issues.

The Net4Care project is funded by The Central Denmark Region and EU via Caretech Innovation.

SmartSantander proposes a unique in the world city-scale experimental research facility in support of typical applications and services for a smart city. This unique experimental facility will be sufficiently large, open and flexible to enable horizontal and vertical federation with other experimental facilities and stimulates development of new applications by users of various types including experimental advanced research on IoT technologies and realistic assessment of users’ acceptability tests. The facility will comprise more than 20,000 sensors and will be based on a real life IoT deployment in an urban setting. The core of the facility will be located in the city of Santander, the capital of the region of Cantabria situated on the north coast of Spain, and its surroundings. SmartSantander will enable the Future Internet of Things to become a reality.

Currently, we are working on solutions to assist traffic control (e.g. a parking solution for persons with disabilities) and environmental monitoring.

Project website: www.smartsantander.eu