The replication of the circle of information coming from the environment, to the skin, to an action mediated by the brain, requires a lot of advances in smart technology and materials development. Embedding sensors in smart architectures that record the stimulus from the environment and transform it into action is the objective of artificial skins. At the moment, different sensors have to be implemented in the artificial skin matrix for each stimulus. The goal of this project is to develop a single multi-stimuli responsive material, which would allow a simplification of the artificial skin and enable unprecedented spatial resolution. The material will be comprised of a smart core, responsive to temperature and humidity, and a piezoelectric shell for pressure sensing. The swelling of the smart core upon stimuli will be sensed by the piezoelectric shell and produce a measurable potential. This architecture will be achieved thanks to the use of novel vapor-based technologies for material processing that allow fabrication at the nanoscale. The advantage of using a dry, vapor-based, polymerization for the smart core is that it will be possible to cumulate different functionalities and engineered composition gradients, which are difficult to obtain by conventional synthesis. Nano-structuration of such materials in core-shell site-specific arrays will allow to create a sensing network with spatial resolution down to 1mm and lower. The network will respond to the stimuli coming from the environment and recognize them in terms of location and type of stimuli. The successful execution of the SmartCore project will have a strong impact in the design and production of future structures, with consequences in sensoring, biotechnology and tissue engineering.

Industry foresight for next 10 years are highlighting how the global economy will be fully globalized and competition for markets will become fiercer. New industrial players from emerging and newly emerged industrial economies will fight for market share with multi-nationals and companies from traditionally industrialized countries, including the EU. This will drive companies seeking for innovation to develop a competitive edge for new products and services, and to adopt operations that are more efficient. Europe is a global leader in supplying advanced manufacturing technologies, however notwithstanding the relevant investment in R&D to develop such technologies, the effective uptake is still weak and European companies are lagging behind in comparison to global competitors regarding demand and use of them. Despite the benefits AMTs offer, the majority of manufacturing SMEs in the EU are not yet using these technologies. One of the key obstacles to AMT adoption is represented by the general weakness of the support system supplying with adequate capacities in all areas of advanced manufacturing sector. The overall project objective of the project is to improve the Advanced Manufacturing Ecosystem for European SMEs by reinforcing the innovation infrastructures that should provide support to manufacturing SME. The aim is thus to collaboratively address a common innovation support challenge consisting in providing adequate support to SMEs in the adoption of AMT. The Peer Learning activity is expected to collect and identify a wide range of services that Innovation intermediary agencies may provide to SMEs to stimulate their transformation through the AMT uptake. The expected Design Options Paper will serve as a “guide” or a “handbook” to other agencies and business support centers to provide more focused support services and to set up “Regional Innovation Hubs” to improve a suitable ecosystem fostering AMT uptake.

In many application areas (e.g. interior design, furniture retailing or renovation), communication with a customer or future user during the planning and design phase is crucial to select the right products and configurations. Making this communication process effective saves costs, avoids later modifications, and results in providing tailored solutions and higher customer satisfaction. AR has the potential to make these communication processes highly effective and provide a better experience for the customer. However, this content needs to be created by experts from the respective domains, who often lack IT and media skills, and shall provide a lightweight AR experience for the customer. Current AR authoring solutions are quite complex and require manually creating scenes or rely on objects prepared with even more complex applications (e.g. CAD). ATLANTIS will fill this gap in authoring AR experiences by creating a faithful textured geometric (3D) representation from images of the real scene and identifying and segmenting objects in the scene and associating them with the 3D representation. The ATLANTIS authoring tool will enable the fusion of 3D CG elements with real scenes in a guided manner using artificial intelligence (AI) to facilitate more productive and effective content creation. This allows automatic alignment of inserted objects and automated layout generation, enabling the user to interact with different options without the need to manually author each of them. In addition, ATLANTIS will innovate beyond traditional AR authoring by complementing its traditional AR authoring capacity with Diminished Reality (DR) authoring capabilities, enabling the removal and replacement of real objects in the scene allowing to visualise also heavy changes to an environment. The innovations of ATLANTIS will be integrated in an existing solution for interior design and retailing, and validated with professionals and customers.

Diabetes is one of the main health risks today with near pandemic dimension, causing blindness, kidney failures, stroke, heart attack, giving rise to very high health care costs (25% in the US) and reducing the quality of life of around 500 million people worldwide. The level of hemoglobin A1c (HbA1c) is used to assess long-term glycemic control and is the best predictor for the risk of developing chronic complication of diabetes and appropriate follow up of the patients. The golden standard is an expert laboratory HPLC method focusing on HbA1c quantification, which has limitations when other relevant hemoglobin variants are to be detected. For approximately 7 % of the world’s population which are carriers of such hemoglobin variants current methods lead to under-, over- or non-estimation of the HbA1c fraction. VortexLC will not only improve the quality of the analysis to give an instant full picture of the health status of diabetes patients, it will also produce a cheap point of care device. The use of vortex flows renders the approach compatible with mass manufacturing of plastic pillar array columns, that are not only much cheaper than commonly used packed bed columns, but wherein also higher separation performances can be obtained. The polymer columns will be fabricated using UV-nanoimprint lithography, plasma technology to make them porous and add a chromatographic coating, and lamination to close the column, all processes that can be scaled to roll-to-roll industrial manufacturing. The columns will be embedded in an instrument that allows for integrated sample preparation and miniaturized UV absorption and SERS detection, allowing for both quantification and identification of analytes. In the project a low footprint demonstrator of the novel system and columns will be built and tested with first synthetic, next human blood samples to quantify Hb1Ac and its genetic variants.