Hospitals must increase their efficiency and productivity and boost quality and safety, while containing and reducing costs. This cannot be an untaught linear reduction. For instance, the number of ICU beds per million of EU habitants was reduced of 75% in the past 30 years, also in response to the unneglectable need to invest on territory healthcare services in response to demographic challenges. This left EU Hospitals completely unprepared to the COVID-19 pandemics.

In order to respond to this challenge the European Commission has invested €40m with a dedicated call, which has selected 4 projects out of 85 proposals.

Dr Leandro Pecchia from the School of Engineering at the University of Warwick, is a key member European collaborative team that has been awarded one of those 4 projects, the ODIN project. The ODIN project has a total value of €13m involving 21 partners from 11 EU countries. This project will support 2 senior PDRAs, who will join Dr Pecchia team in 2021.

Dr Pecchia said:

“We have identified 11 hospital critical challenges, which ODIN will face combining robotics, Internet of Things (IoT) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) to empower workers, medical locations, logistics and interaction with the territory. ODIN will deploy technologies along three lines of intervention:

· empowering workers using AI, cybernetics and bionics;

· introducing autonomous and collaborative robots for enhancing hospital efficacy and safety;

· introducing and enhancing medical locations and medical device management with IoT and video analytics

These areas of intervention will be piloted in six top hospitals in six European cities (Berlin in Germany, Paris in France, Rome in Italy, Madrid in Spain, Utrecht in The Netherland and Lodz in Poland), spanning from clinical to logistic interventions, including patient management, disaster preparedness (e.g., reorganising Hospitals in case of pandemics) and hospital resiliency.

ODIN pilot will be a federation of multicentre longitudinal cohort studies, demonstrating the safety, effectiveness and cost-effectiveness of ODIN technologies for the enhancement of hospital safety, productivity and quality.

ODIN vision is that as Evidence Based Medicine revolutionized medicine with data-driven procedures, so data-driven management, enabled by Industry 4.0 technologies, can revolutionise hospital management.

Beyond this project, I believe it is important to appreciate that our successes in the H2020 are the results of several factors, including vision, competence and constructive collaboration with European Scholars. This proposal in particular, is the result of the collaboration with Dr Giuseppe Fico, which visited Warwick last year as IAS Fernandes Fellow. ”

This is the 5th successful project written by Dr Pecchia and his EU partners, focusing on IoT, AI, Robots and big-data for healthcare.

Further information can be found at https://odin-smarthospitals.eu/