Healthcare expenditure represents on average 8.3% of European GDP. Hospitals are highly complex organisations, typically with thousands of employees and hundreds of admissions and operations performed every day, in large spread-out areas. They look very much like “micro-cities” and their costs represent an approximate staggering 60% of total healthcare expenditure. Daily operations in hospitals involve a range of time consuming and complicated processes (care, logistic, operative, etc.), which must run smoothly to provide (cost-) effective, safe and friendly healthcare assistance to the population. A medium-large hospital spends more than 70% of its yearly budget on surgical interventions. Healthcare cuts in recent years, sometimes reducing budgets by up to 10%, have made it more difficult to maintain the high quality and excellent performance of public health services. Indeed, waiting lists for surgical procedures are rising due to an increase in both healthcare demand and service cuts. Surprisingly, the most complex and expensive process in hospitals —the surgical process— is still managed in a rudimentary way by relying on professionals repeatedly phoning each other to look for available people (i.e. ancillary), information and essential items in time demanding situations. MYSPHERA has identified this need, which has no current solution in the market. By leveraging its cutting edge RTLS technology, MYSPHERA presents a unique and pioneering service in this project that will transform the delivery of healthcare in hospitals. Automating information, events and tasks will transform hospitals into proactive organisations. In turn, MYSPHERA will change its product portfolio to move into a higher position in the value chain. OR4.0 is an opportunity to boost one of the most prominent companies in the emerging RTLS healthcare market, which is dominated by strong US companies, and, in turn, to improve the performance of hospitals in Europe and elsewhere.

MYSPHERA has rolled out a game changing IoT location solution to track and manage patient pathways in real time. It automates the surgical process by means of tailored applications that empower staff with live patient-flow data and notifications. As a result, the solution has obtained references in several EU countries that note a significant capacity increase. Deploying this solution takes few months of co-design work with the hospital, which limits its scale-up potential. We aim to reduce the effort and time by an order of magnitude, falling from months to just a few days. An AI-Powered Visual Assistive Design IoT Pathway Platform based on Spatial Process Mining and Machine Learning technologies has been prototyped to complete this radical leap by streamlining the design, tailoring and deployment of optimal pathways and elective care planning projects, for any hospital, unit, and in a matter of days.

Hospital managers face a significant burden of paperwork and administrative tasks. A recent survey reveals that health and social care managers spend 20% of their time on administrative duties, with many feeling they ‘waste’ over 20 hours a week on bureaucracy. Quality monitoring and improvement programs are overwhelming professionals with paperwork, adding to their burden. Simultaneously, the pressure on hospitals to reduce surgical waiting lists post-COVID has become critical, with waiting times surging across specialties. By the end of last year, a record 819.000 patients were waiting for surgery in Spain—88.000 more than in December 2021, representing a 12% increase. The situation in the UK is even worse, leading to a negative perception of healthcare accessibility among European citizens. To address this, healthcare management must shift from the current reactive approach to proactive process management. The solution lies in combining IoT patient tracking technology and real-time predictive modeling with a new Large Language Model (LLM) specialized in assisting hospital managers at various levels, enabling continuous service improvement. OR-GenAI aims to develop the first GenAI assistant to empower hospital managers in their daily decision-making and administrative tasks, boosting surgical block performance by up to 25%. To achieve this innovation, MYSPHERA will collaborate with a formidable technical team and the University of Granada, a top international player in this field. With this game-changing solution, OR-GenAI can propel MYSPHERA’s growth, disrupting the current market of patient flow solutions. An ambitious international plan is in place to consolidate its presence in the EU and enter the US market by 2026.

Planning and mental simulation of actions and outcomes are a major cognitive trait of humans. We predict action consequences and perform goal-directed actions in proactive, forward-looking ways. By contrast, systems that lack predictive planning are reactive and dominated by reflex-like, cumbersome behaviors. Most currently existing brain-machine-interfaces (BMI) fall into this category. Plan4Act sets out to go beyond this by inferring actions from action-predicting neural activity of complex action sequences. Neurophysiology in non-human primates recently revealed that such encoding is far more widespread than previously thought. The goal of the Plan4Act project is to record and understand predictive neural activity and use it to proactively control devices in a smart house. The far-future vision behind this is to endow motor-impaired patients with the ability to plan a daily-life goal – like making coffee – and achieve it without having to invoke one by one every single individual action to reach this goal. To approach this complex problem, we record multi-unit action predicting activity in macaques (WP1), model this by adaptive neural networks (WP2), design therefrom an embedded (FPGA-based) controller (WP3), and interface it with a smart house (WP4) to control action sequences with a clear look-ahead property. The main outcome of this project is a system that integrates the above components at TRL4 for which we quantify improved reaction speed and robustness of this type of proactive BMI control. The understanding and use of predictive neural signals for machine control is novel and methods, algorithms, and hardware developed to translate predictive planning from neural activity to technology create the major general impact of this project. Potential translational and commercial interests will be assessed by our industrial partner, where specifically the embedded controller and its smart house interface are expected to create near-future commercial impact, too.

Electronics are set to merge with our bodies to extend our perceptions. Smartphones and watches will give way to the bodyNET: a network of sensors and smart devices woven into our clothing, worn on our skin and implanted in our bodies. Smart wearables are the next step in the Internet of Things wearable evolution. This market is one of the most vigorous over the coming years. SINTEC addresses a market, in terms of size, that reach over €70BN by 2026. A large amount of scientific results have emerged and a few start-ups are focused on stretchable electronics and sensors that employ liquid alloys for interconnects and passive components. However, there are until today no dedicated commercial equipment for manufacturing of such devices. This hinders large-scale industrial exploration and needs to be addressed. By a novel manufacturing technology for large area rigid-stretch PCB and integration, SINTEC will provide soft, sticky and stretchable sensor patches that can be used multiple times and at longer periods. With its dynamic compliance and water repellent permeable encapsulation it withstands vigorous action, sweating and water; making it ideal for an active life. A ground breaking intra body communication technique gives large bandwidth and secure consumption at low power, allowing for multiplex sensoric inputs from many nodes on the body. To demonstrate the advantages of the novel technology, SINTEC will apply it in clinical environment and in athletics performance evaluation. Industrial partners will exploit the results in manufacturing technology, Fat-IBC, and in soft compliant smart patch applications, e.g., in preventive care, sports and fitness, and medical technology.