Patients with cancer often have to make complex decisions about treatment, with the options varying in risk profiles and effects on survival and quality of life. Data-driven decision-support tools (DSTs) have the potential to empower patients, support personalized care, improve health outcomes, and promote health equity (optimal decisions also for underserved groups). However, DSTs currently seldom consider quality of life or individual preferences, and their use in clinical practice remains limited. To address these challenges, the 4D PICTURE consortium will further develop a promising methodology, MetroMapping, to redesign care paths that include novel DSTs. We will better predict treatment outcomes by developing innovative algorithms and incorporating patient experiences, values and preferences, using AI-based models. In co-creation with patients and other stakeholders, we will develop data-driven DSTs for patients with breast cancer, prostate cancer and melanoma. We will evaluate these DSTs as part of MetroMapping as well as stand-alone, to ensure their sustainability as well as addressing social and ethical issues. We will explore the generalizability of MetroMapping and the DSTs to other types of cancer and across other EU member states. Improved care paths integrating comprehensive DSTs will empower patients, their significant others and health care providers in decision making, and strengthen care at the system level by improving resilience and efficiency. Whereas the 4D PICTURE consortium includes leaders in modelling, AI, decision making, citizen science, service design, ethics, risk communication, and policy making, this project will impact clinical practice and science across Europe and beyond.

This project aims to help people with dementia engage in social contexts to improve psychosocial wellbeing. People who are affected by Alzheimer’s disease or other dementias often face cognitive, behavioural and psychosocial difficulties, including impairment and degeneration of memory and of perceptions of identity. In a social context, this can cause difficulties of recognizing, relating to and empathising with other people. These difficulties often pose a challenge for engaging socially, reinforcing their effects and reducing personal well-being. Design can offer novel ways of complementing existing care approaches to empower people with dementia in everyday social situations. Utilising the concept of mindful design, we will investigate innovative design solutions to enable self-empowerment and confidence building of people living with dementia. We will specifically focus on two areas: personal difficulties with social interaction and environmental influences on social engagement. In these two contexts, we will study how personal, wearable designs can help mediate perceptions of identity and emotion management; and how environmental aspects can reduce feelings of information overload and instill feelings of self-empowerment and control. The outcomes and benefits of the project will include: the development of new uses of design for helping people with dementia to engage socially and improve subjective well-being; the presentation of a robust methodological co-design framework for the development and evaluation of the designs in dementia care settings; the development of a holistic mindful model of designing and of a model for mindful care for social engagement for people with dementia; policy recommendations for the inclusion of design within dementia care. This groundbreaking project will be enabled through an innovative consortium of academic and non-academic partners that combines research in product and environmental design, ICT, and dementia care.