Because of the high demand for eggs, large numbers of hens are farmed in modern egg production. Because of the intensity of this form of farming, the public has justifiably been concerned about the welfare of these birds. Higher welfare also leads to higher quality eggs, higher productivity, and lower incidence of disease and therefore lower need for antibiotics. We aim to reduce the chronic stress experienced by hens. To this end, we will investigate the neurobiological, genetic and developmental factors that lead to higher stress resilience, and the environmental (housing) factors that lead to chronic stress. Europe has led the world in hen welfare with the complete ban of battery cages (European Union Council Directive 1999/74/EC). However, the replacement housing systems have their own potential welfare challenges. Our goal is to identify these challenges and develop improvements for implementation by industry. We will train a new generation of innovative and entrepreneurial early-stage researchers, able to face different challenges related to poultry farming and to apply scientific knowledge and ideas to products and services for economic and social benefit. To do this, we will constitute an international network of groups with expertise in avian brain research, genetics, welfare and egg farming. The training will be complemented by secondments in different laboratories of the network, workshops, and industrial secondments in the poultry industry. The new generation of professionals will apply this knowledge and experience to improve poultry housing systems, welfare, and product quality, which will grow the sector's resilience in addressing growing societal demands for higher animal welfare and healthier diets. Moreover, they will contribute to strengthen Europe's human capital in R&I, increase Europe's attractiveness as a leading research destination, improve Europe's competitiveness and growth, and engage in an improved knowledge-based economy and society.

Compared to the pace of innovation in electronic consumer products, the pace of innovation for medical devices is lagging behind. It is the overarching objective of Moore4Medical to accelerate innovation in electronic medical devices. Moore4Medical emerging medical applications that offer significant new opportunities for the ECS industry including: active implantable devices (bioelectronic medicines), organ-on-chip, drug adherence monitoring, smart ultrasound, radiation free interventions and continuous monitoring. The new technologies will help fighting the increasing cost of healthcare by: reducing the need for hospitalization, helping the development of personalized therapies, and realizing intelligent point-of-care diagnostic tools. Moore4Medical will bring together 68 specialists from 12 countries who will develop open technology platforms for these emerging fields to help them bridge “the Valley of Death” in shorter time and at lower cost. Open technology platforms used by multiple users for multiple applications with the prospect of medium to high volume markets are an attractive proposition for the European ECS industry. The combination of typical MedTech applications with an ECS style platform approach will enhance the competitiveness for the emerging medical domains addressed in Moore4Medical. With value and IP moving from the technology level towards applications and solutions, defragmentation and open technology platforms will be key in acquiring and maintaining a premier position for Europe in the forefront of affordable healthcare

We put our lives increasingly in the hands of smart complex systems making decisions that directly affect our health and wellbeing. This is very evident in healthcare - where systems watch over your health - as well as in traffic - where autonomous driving solutions are gradually taking over control of the car. The accuracy and timeliness of the decisions depend on the systems’ ability to build a good understanding of both you and your environment, which relies on observations and the ability to reason on them. This project will bring perception sensing technologies like Radar, LiDAR and Time of Flight cameras to the next level, enhancing their features to allow for more accurate detection of human behaviour and physiological parameters. Besides more accurate automotive solutions ensuring driver vigilance and pedestrian and cyclist safety, this innovation will open up new opportunities in health and wellbeing to monitor elderly people at home or unobtrusively assess health state. To facilitate building the complex smart sensing systems envisioned and ensure their secure and reliable operation, the new Distributed Intelligence paradigm will be embraced, enhanced and supported by tools. It leverages the advantages of Edge and Cloud computing, building on the distributed computational resources increasingly available in sensors and edge components to distribute also the intelligence. The goal of this project is to develop next generation smart perception sensors and enhance the distributed intelligence paradigm to build versatile, secure, reliable, and proactive human monitoring solutions for the health, wellbeing, and automotive domains The project brings together major industrial players and research partners to address top challenges in health, wellbeing, and automotive domains through three use cases: integral vitality monitoring for elderly and exercise, driver monitoring, and providing safety and comfort for vulnerable road users at intersections.

The ambition of the CONNECARE consortium is to co-design, develop, deploy, and evaluate a novel smart, adaptive integrated care system for chronic care management. This will save European healthcare organisations huge sums whilst improving patient outcomes. The consortium contains all the necessary partners to ensure success. Based on the concept of 4P medicine, CONNECARE will provide decision support for the adaptive management of personalised clinical pathways and will deliver tools to monitor patients’ activities and status, thus empowering them and providing them with recommendations to self-manage their condition, resulting in substantial improvements in their quality of life. The three dimensions underpinning the required proposed paradigm shift are: 1. Organisational: making health and social care systems interoperable, promoting collaboration among care settings, and moving from institutional reactive care to a home-based preventive model. 2. Care and social services: addressing health risk prediction by combining already operational population-based tools with a patient-based five-dimension scoring strategy consisting of i) screening, ii) risk stratification, iii) mapping, iv) intervention, and v) surveillance. 3. Technological: delivering a CONNECARE system which leverages existing assets from partners to offer smart Adaptive Case Management, self-management and 3-level monitoring features, fully integrated with management systems in place. An iterative patient-centred co-design process will ensure a progressive refinement of model and tools, providing foundations for adoption and transferability. In addition, clinical trials will be held in three leading-light regions in integrated care uptake –Catalonia, Israel, and Groningen – to evidence improvements in outcomes and efficiency. Consortium members are active in the EIP AHA B3 Action Group; transfer of results to relevant stakeholders across Europe, beyond the stakeholders in CONNECARE, is guaranteed.