Five INCAREHEART public procurers from five countries will jointly procure an ICT-enabled integrated care solution to effectively support the management of a multidisciplinary care and support model for people living with Chronic Heart Failure (CHF). Building on the partial advances seen in integrated healthcare delivery, for the first time a range of features will be integrated into a modular solution to effectively bring different care providers, family carers, and patients into a shared CHF care pathway cutting across diagnosis, acute care and jointly managed long term care. INCAREHEART will profoundly improve the quality of care and support for CHF patients as well as the cost-effectiveness of European health and social care systems by radically improving, integrating, and coordinating care. Introducing seamless transitional care processes are expected to effectively reduce emergency care needs, hospitalisation rates as well as increase treatment adherence. The INCAREHEART solution will at its core seamlessly integrate into existing ICT systems, but also into processes and working practices. The procurers have developed a comprehensive framework for setting out the design requirements to be addressed by an integrated ICT-enabled heart failure care solution. Suppliers will be rigorously evaluated after each of the procurement phases, comprising (I) an open market consultation, (II) specification of architecture and system aligned to requirements of patients, peers, and providers, (III) prototype development and testing with end-users and (IV) effectiveness proven in a trial with 500 patients and 125 professionals. INCAREHEART will serve 1,320,000 million patients with heart failure once it is fully rolled out in the procurer countries. Proven ability to cover the different health systems promises INCAREHEART suppliers’ easy entry into other EU markets and beyond, a very strong contribution to overcoming fragmentation of demand and fostering the global market.

EMPOWERING proposal contributes to the shift of 6 EU regions toward low-carbon society by enhancing the capacities of municipalities and regional representatives to shape integrated energy strategies and plans. The project contributes to bridge the gap of skills needed to plan energy measures in the new 2030 framework for Climate and Energy Policy in terms of GHG emission reduction, renewable energy and energy efficiency. EMPOWERING addresses energy saving challenges involving local municipalities and regional authorities in a sound transnational exchange and learning activities (WP3) including: a) transnational seminars; b) peer to peer exchange for regional authorities; c) study visit to one EU best practice and two partners’ best practice. Local target audience is then effectively reached thanks to ad hoc capacity local building measures (WP4) addressing different target groups to maximize the learning experience. The improved knowledge and competences of local authorities are put into practice during the development of the mitigation part of SECAPs and in the upgrading of the existing SEAPs, while regional authorities are supported in shaping regional energy vision to 2050 highlighting the main energy challenges and identifying possible financial strategic actions to be implemented (WP5). The proposal is built on a solid and innovative strategic planning methodology which has a high replicability potential, strengthening the European added value of the project. This process is triggered by the cooperation of a comprehensive partnership, which involves technical-scientific partners and regional development agencies, creating the conditions to achieve project’s objectives.

The Mobile Age project will focus on open government data, mobile technology, and the provision of public services in relation to Europe’s elderly population. Europe’s senior citizens are growing steadily and are predicted to comprise of 28% of Europe’s population by 2020. However, senior citizens do not normally share the same level of connectivity to the Internet as younger generations, and while government agencies are increasingly providing their services through digital platforms, this risks excluding senior citizens from the design and use of such services. Mobile Age will provide the basis for the development of mobile-based open government services focused on senior citizens. We follow a co-creation methodological approach that will allow for a substantive participation of senior citizens. MobileAge will focus on the co-creation of services related to the production and use of open data for cities. This will be achieved by pursuing four objectives: i) exploring and implementing innovative ways to support senior citizens to access and use public services through personal mobile technologies that are based on open government data, ii) develop and deploy co-creation approaches and methodologies to engage senior citizens effectively; iii) develop a situated, practice-based understanding of accessibility, mobility and usability of services from a senior-citizen point of view; and iv) develop a framework for impact assessment and evaluation for co-creation approaches to open service development for the ageing population. Mobile Age’s approach will be applied in cities and counties that are already providing innovative approaches for the participation of senior people in the development of city services: Bremen, South Lakeland, Zaragoza and the Region of Central Macedonia, with scenarios related to social inclusion, extending independent living, data curation for a safer and more accessible city, and the management of personal health information.

The project partners share a vision of a borderless European digital health innovation ecosystem, deeply rooted in the UNITE regions. A European ecosystem that can tackle the challenges and capture the opportunities of the demographic transitions and the emerging “silver economy” in full. A borderless ecosystem which brings together key stakeholders from a diverse set of regions, from the private sector, the public sector, academia and the civic society. An ecosystem encouraging and enabling entrepreneurship, and pushing the local start-ups to scale up, and importantly an ecosystem that naturally facilitates and opens up new interregional European value chains. The project brings together a wide and diverse group of regional and national ecosystems that reach the borders of European geographical, economic, cultural and care system diversities. A group of regions with a complementing bundle of challenges and aspirations to reach, assets to mobilise and barriers to overcome together. It makes use and builds upon the EIT Digital Strategic Innovation Agenda for Digital Wellbeing, which is directly aligned and supports the regions’ RIS3 and long-term strategies, serving as the basis for the UNITE cofunding commitments and joint activities plan. The partners’ vision to unite the open, borderless, regionally-anchored European digital health innovation ecosystem calls for an UNITEd intervention that: - Connects the fragmented value chains, dispersed ecosystems and pockets of excellence and regional specialisation ambitions; - Fosters the co-learning between the ecosystems and enables growing together; creates strategic and tactical examples of interregional value chains and digital solutions; and - Elevates the nexus of strategies between the regional ecosystems and the global digital health networks and opportunities in long-term.

The strategic objective of CityCLIM is to significantly contribute to delivering the next-generation of City Climate Services based on advanced weather forecast models enhanced with data both from existing, but insufficiently used, sources and emerging data sources, such as satellite data (e.g., Copernicus data) or data generated by Citizens Science approaches for Urban Climate Monitoring etc. For City Climate Services, data products of interest related to land surface properties, atmospheric properties (e.g., aerosol optical thickness), geometry etc. For all of those, information of interest concerns e.g., Copernicus data products and services that are already existing (e.g., based on Sentinel-3/OLCI, PROBA-V, SPOT, Sentinel-1, MetopASCAT data), will exist in the near future (based on already flying satellites such as Sentinel-2), or will exist in the mid-term (based on satellites currently under development) and long-term (based on satellites soon starting concept phase) future. The project will establish; (i) an open platform allowing for efficient building of services based on access to diverse data; (ii) enhanced weather models based on data from diverse existing and emerging sources; (iii) a set of City Climate Services customizable to specific needs of users in cities; and (iv) a generic Framework for building next generation of Urban Climate Services. CityCLIM will be driven by 4 Pilots addressing diverse climate regions in Europe (Luxembourg, Thessaloniki, Valencia, Karlsruhe) which will define requirements upon the tools to be developed, support specification and testing of the services and serve as demonstrators of the selected approaches and the developed technologies. The consortium will elaborate business plan to assure sustainability of the platform and services.