Hospitals all over the world must increase their efficiency and productivity and boost quality and safety, while containing and reducing costs. Over years, this resulted in linear cuts, which proved to be a disaster during the COVID-19 pandemic.

The European Commission has invested €40 million to foster researchers that may redesign the hospital of the future, financing 4 projects in this area. Dr Leandro Pecchia from the School of Engineering will lead a Work Package within one of these 4 projects, the ODIN project.

The ODIN project has a total value of €13 million for 21 partners from 11 EU countries. This project will support 2 senior PDRAs, which will join Dr Pecchia team in 2021.

EU Hospitals were completely unprepared to fight the COVID-19 pandemic, also because the number of ICU beds per million of EU habitants has been reduced by 75% in the past 30 years, and due to the unneglectable need to invest in territory healthcare services in response to demographic challenges.

Dr Leandro Pecchia, from the School of Engineering at the University of Warwick comments:

“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

Dr Pecchia continues:

“These areas of intervention will be piloted in six top hospitals in Berlin, Paris, Rome, Madrid, Utrecht and Lodz. ODIN will span from clinical to logistic procedures, including patient management, medical device and PPE management, disaster preparedness for example reorganising Hospitals in case of pandemics, and hospital resiliency.”

The researchers will work with three top medical device manufacturers: Samsung, Philips and Medtronics; as well as seven SMEs to achieve the vision of the project, which is that hospital management can be revolutionised by using data driven management such as Industry 4.0 technologies, the same way evidence based medicine revolutionised medicine with data-driven procedures.

This is the 5th successful project within the last 12 months for which Dr Pecchia is a key research partner, focusing on IoT, AI, Robots and big-data for healthcare, for a total value of £35 million.

ENDS

8 OCTOBER 2020

NOTES TO EDITORS

High-res images available at:

https://warwick.ac.uk/services/communications/medialibrary/images/november2018/leandro_pecchia.png
Caption: Dr Leandro Pecchia, from the School of Engineering at the University of Warwick
Credit: University of Warwick

For further information please contact:

Alice Scott
Media Relations Manager – Science
University of Warwick
Tel: +44 (0) 7920 531 221
E-mail: alice.j.scott@warwick.ac.uk

For further information please contact:

Alice Scott
Media Relations Manager – Science
University of Warwick
Tel: +44 (0) 7920 531 221
E-mail: alice.j.scott@warwick.ac.uk