GATEKEEPER Open Call

First initiative

The first GATEKEEPER Open Call, which closed on February 28th, 2021, marked a crucial milestone in our European project. A total of 114 proposals were received, addressing the 6 challenges, with applicants from 23 countries worldwide. These proposals were submitted through the online platform, demonstrating global interest and active participation in our initiative.

We warmly thank all applicants for their interest and participation in our 1st Open Call, which made it a success of participation. Additionally, an independent evaluation of the proposals was conducted by 26 external experts, resulting in the selection of 11 winners who are now considered candidates for funding and incorporation into the GATEKEEPER project.

The geographical distribution of the received proposals reflected the diversity and international scope of our project. From Spain to Hungary, including countries such as Italy, Greece, the UK, and many more within the European Union, significant contributions were received from various parts of the continent. This broad participation demonstrated the global commitment of GATEKEEPER and its ability to bring together diverse entities and stakeholders in the pursuit of innovative solutions.

We are pleased to highlight the diversity of participating entities in this Open Call, ranging from emerging startups to established academic institutions, and from established companies to non-profit organizations. This variety enriched our innovation ecosystem and reinforced our commitment to open collaboration and diverse perspectives.

Having completed the evaluation, we are pleased to inform the top 11 list to be candidate for funding and incorporation into the GATEKEEPER project:

Lead Organization Name: Envira Sostenible S.A.

ENVIRA is a company with expertise in the development of solutions for monitoring environmental parameters in industrial, urban and farming environments, as well as in handling the data generated.

Project: Nanoenvi

Nanoenvi IAQ is a commercial solution for environmental monitoring at indoor locations. Nanoenvi IAQ system is composed by sensor devices to be deployed and a federation platform of services from Envira, but also from other third-party partners, providing analytics and tools for data exploitation. Interoperability within this ecosystem is achieved by applying WoT open standards (each device and service is managed «as a Thing») One of the most demanded features are the «Environmental Indices Calculation Services», which are AI services to calculate relevant standard environmental indices for industries and people such as: air quality index, thermal comfort index, COVID19 transmission risk index, environmental safety for asthmatic people at work locations index, etc. The objective of the present proposal is to integrate Nanoenvi IAQ environmental indices into GK ecosystem.

Lead Organization Name: Spirocco Ltd.

Is a Hungary-based SME developing medical devices and telehealth applications, services related to respiratory diseases for many years. The company has extended experience in the development and manufacturing of smart inhalers, spirometers, and flow meters. Scirocco uses its own resources for the design, manufacturing, and testing of prototypes, electronic control and communication systems, and software.

Project: Kanban based organizer for informal care

Our development is a Kanban-based care organizer mobile application relying on the Gatekeeper ecosystem. The app can be used to schedule and reschedule tasks, organize and monitor suggestions and needs generated by the elders, informal and professional carers in an intuitive way, making it easy to use for elderly people. With the help of Kanban cards, it logs and organizes tasks, and makes the current and historical data, and the schedule available to professionals, informal carers, family members and others involved in carrying. Text and video chat for bidirectional communication, as well as emergency call functions are also included in the app. Different medical and home monitoring devices can be integrated into the system, the data of which are also stored on the server and made available to professionals via the web interface. An AI-based machine learning algorithm is used to evaluate the historical data for early-detection and prediction of interventions, additional needs and tasks, as well as load estimation and bottlenecks of local informal caregiving ecosystems. Our project is addressing challenge 3 of the call (Informal care coordination system).

Lead Organization Name: BRAINGAZE

Founded in September 2013 as a high-tech spin-off from the University of Barcelona (UB) and the Catalan Institution for Research and Advanced Studies (ICREA), BRAINGAZE focuses on the development and commercialization of next-generation mind tracking solutions for the early and accurate diagnosis and digital treatment of several cognitive impairments. 

The company, founded by the entrepreneur Laszlo Bax and the neurobiologist Professor Doctor Hans Supèr consists of a multi-cultural, multi-disciplinary mix of mathematicians, psychologists, clinical specialists, software developers, marketing experts and clinical and business development professionals with strong experience in their fields.

Project: BGaze

Cognitive disorders, specifically dementia and Alzheimer’s disease (the most common subtype), are one of the leading causes of ill-health and disability globally, with high level of social and economic burden. Efforts to diagnose dementia and Alzheimer’s disease (AD) at earlier stages are being doing as a means to maximise treatment options, adapt healthier lifestyles and enable patients to ‘prepare for their future’. People affected by dementia also present visual and ocular movements problems, which include decreased visual acuity, poor colour discrimination, and visual field loss. Our studies show a gradual change in a novel type of minuscule, involuntary eye movement that is triggered when we attend and memorize objects as the neurodegenerative process progresses. This marker is termed Cognitive Vergence. BRAINGAZE assesses Cognitive Vergence through in-house developed sensory tasks and relates them with the cognitive level in order to diagnose impairments. Our game-changing innovation, BGaze system, is a diagnostic softwarebased platform that make use of Cognitive Vergence biomarker. Cognitive Vergence has proven to be intimately linked to cognitive brain processes. Through scientific proven attention tasks performed by patients at the clinic or at home together with AI-based classification algorithms and deep/machine learning techniques, BGaze allows clinicians to objectively monitor cognitive health and detect people at risk developing dementia within minutes with a 93% diagnostic accuracy and up to ten years before the first clinical symptoms of dementia appear. Thus, it can be used as a non-invasive, robust biomarker to assess cognitive status on a regular basis in elderly. The solution addresses the challenges of the Lifestyle-related early detection and interventions call.

Lead Organization Name: Ab.Acus

Ab.Acus is a high-tech company whose mission is translating scientific research into innovative tools, making mainstream technologies serving healthcare while reducing its costs. Ab.Acus is deploying pioneering solutions in the field of digital biomarkers, telerehabilitation, home care monitoring, and digital therapeutics.

Project: SPEAKapp - Remote speech assessment for therapy follow up and morbidity monitoring

Speech and language assessment is a powerful yet unobtrusive tool that can support clinical diagnosis and monitoring in a wide range of clinical conditions implicating cognitive and affective symptoms such as Diabetes, Stroke, and Parkinson’s disease. Recent advances in Natural Language Processing (NLP) have proven their ability to both overcome the practical barriers of data acquisition and analysis, as well as to yield reliable digital endpoints of cognitive and affective status. However, in order to effectively build upon these potentialities and hence meet real clinical and research needs, it is pivotal to bridge the gap between end users and clinicians on one hand, and developers and researchers on the other hand. SPEAKapp is a functional app prototype for mobile devices to deliver and analyze speech and language data, specifically developed for clinical and research purposes. Based on cutting-edge AI technologies for the analysis of audio waves and semantic contents of speech outputs and incorporating standard assessment tools, SPEAKapp specifically address the GATEKEEPER’s Challenge 6 Embedded Machine Learning in Smart Devices. SPEAKapp is an easy-to-use yet powerful tool that put the end user at the center of the clinical process, support and empowering both patients and clinicians in the everyday management and monitoring of the disease. SPEAKapp will be made available to GATEKEEPER’s Pilot Sites through the GATEKEEPER platform, thus enabling its evaluation and benchmark assessment through access to technology, test beds and data sets.

Lead Organization Name: Nissatech

Is an eleven-years old, innovation-driven SME with strong international cooperation and vision to become European leader in developing advanced IT solutions for real-time processing to be used in various industries and businesses. The main objective is to develop own technological building blocks through an efficient implementation of the cutting-edge research and their usage for resolving very challenging real-world problems in different domains. Building blocks enable us the flexibility in providing heterogeneous solutions, ensure scalability and support continual improvement of our technologies.

Project: Personal Health Twin for ensuring healthier independent lives for senior people

A full adoption of smartwatch technology for personalized medicine is lacking a more intelligent and personalized processing of the collected data, on the smartwatch itself. This would lead to the smart personalized healthcare ensuring healthier independent lives for senior people, which is the ultimate goal of this proposal (and also one of main objectives of the GATEKEEPER project). In the nutshell of the proposal is the complex modeling of a person health-related behaviour using advanced AI and big data techniques. The main goal is to create digital replicas which will enable a comprehensive analysis of the health of a person, so called Personal Health Twin. In this way we create a holistic, multi model view on the behaviour of a person, which can be used for the creation of various services for remote monitoring, early detection and intervention. Due to resource-constrained nature of the smartwatch, this process should be performed in a very efficient way which is one of the unique selling points in this proposal, based on our huge experience in developing smartwatch based commercial solutions (apps and backend). Indeed, this proposal will leverage the already existing system for smartwatch-based personalized fitness (Smart4Fit, TRL9), by extending the personal and intelligent processing on smartwatch for healthcare scenarios and extending the personal model based on GATEKEEPER Information model. The proposal addresses the Challenge 6 “Embedded ML in Smart devices”, planning the implementation of three services, which cover three main aspects of the Personal Health Twin: a) advanced medium-long term behavioural changes detection based on activity detection, b) mental condition monitoring and c) remote health status monitoring, early detection and intervention. Regarding large scale pilots, the goal is to enlarge and extend selected ones (starting with Basque country, Saxony) with planned services, available in the GATEKEEPER’s platform. The proposal is very aligned with our business strategy and opens huge market opportunities in the smart personalized healthcare domain.

Lead Organization Name: Gripwise

Gripwise’s technology is the result of years of research developed at the University of Porto, from which it is a Spin-off. It has already been tested as a prototype under the Porto4Ageing project, leading to the publication of 12 scientific articles and is the subject of several master’s/doctoral theses, culminating in the 1st Fresenius Clinical Nutrition Award in 2014.

International patent number P300.3WO, was filed in September 2016 by the University of Porto with our CTO as a co-inventor. Gripwise Tech, Lda has an exclusive commercial agreement with the University, based on royalties, with the possibility of acquisition of the patent.

Project: FasteR and AGILE way to assess frailty status in network

Informal care has a key communicative role in helping physicians to learn about the patient and in facilitating information exchange between the doctor and the patient. Nowadays 60% of the elder population of Europe suffers from some level of physical frailty, with the estimated costs to EU Healthcare Systems surpassing 81 Billion €/year. Frailty is the most problematic sign of the aging population and a strong indicator of physical vulnerability. It can be assessed using 5 criteria, which rank the elderly as normal, prefrail or frail. Based on this, frailty screening, diagnosis and treatment are of major relevance, more so, because Frailty is potentially modifiable with adequate and opportune simple interventions. To address this situation and assess Frailty in the elderly, we created Gripwise, a technology based on a smart load cell, with an accelerometer and gyroscope, all integrated and connected into a system capable of a full frailty workflow assessment, done in a simple and fast way. Its streamlined workflow, with basic training, allows caregivers to assess Frailty even without technical skills. The app integrates all results and provides a full report which is transferred to a Cloud platform, allowing diagnosis of the elderly by health professionals. This solution squarely meets GATEKEEPER challenge #3. With Gripwise, caregivers can help to detect Frailty early and share results with the Health Care Systems. This solution allows health professionals to diagnose and followup on their patients even at a distance. This addresses the issue of sharing the responsibility of caring between the caregiver and the physician, prescribing personalized physical activity and nutrition to help maintain energy, functionality, and quality of life of the elderly. This bi-lateral communication can reduce the frequency of doctor’s appointments and support routine activities, causing a reduction in overall health costs, while still maintaining quality of life.

Lead Organization Name: The University of Vigo

The University of Vigo is a public university located in Galicia (North-western Spain) committed to institutional cooperation, solidarity and the preservation of the natural environment, recognized and valued for the quality of the services offered, the efficiency, effectiveness and transparency of its management, and for its academic prestige. it offers engineer degrees in Mining, Telecommunications, Forestry Engineering, Computer Science and Industrial Engineering, among others. 

Founded in 1990 as a spin-off of the University of Santiago de Compostela, University’s 20.000 students are studying on its into three campuses at the cities of Vigo, Ourense and Pontevedra. Considered the most technical of the universities of Galicia, the university offers bachelor’s, master’s, and doctoral degrees in more than 150 program areas including technology, industry, business, communication and the arts, education, government, law, leadership, and nursing and healthcare. 

Project: Panoramix: Serious Games for the Early Detection of Cognitive Impairment

This proposal aims to incorporate in the GATEKEEPER platform a battery of serious games to detect cognitive impairment in elder adults. This game battery assesses different cognitive areas and uses machine learning techniques to discriminate among players suffering from mild cognitive impairment or Alzheimer disease from healthy adults. Using the battery, it is also possible to identify individuals likely to develop cognitive decline, to predict the future evolution of cognitive decline and to contribute to keep the cognitive reserve of elder adults. The battery complies with the psychometric properties set of the Standards for Educational and Psychological Testing, that is, it meets all the clinical criteria to be considered as a valid screening tool.

Lead Organization Name: CognitEye

The CognitEye develops cutting-edge deep learning technologies to recognize video semantics automatically. CognitEye was founded by four alumni and scientists from the KU Leuven, who acquired an accumulative experience in audio-visual data processing through involvement in many international projects.

The members of the leadership team know each other very well due to working in the same university before starting CognitEye. The CEO and CTO of CognitEye Dr. Farahani and Dr. Diba are young, highly motivated, and dynamic scientists and are highly supported by Dr. Bahari who has been recognized by MIT Technology Review as top ten Belgian talents in 2017 for developing SensifAI video semantic concept recognition startup.

Project: On-device video semantic concept recognition: a wearable personal vision assistant

The CognitEye develops cutting-edge deep learning technologies to recognize video semantics automatically. CognitEye was founded by four alumni and scientists from the KU Leuven, who acquired an accumulative experience in audio-visual data processing through involvement in many international projects.

The members of the leadership team know each other very well due to working in the same university before starting CognitEye. The CEO and CTO of CognitEye Dr. Farahani and Dr. Diba are young, highly motivated, and dynamic scientists and are highly supported by Dr. Bahari who has been recognized by MIT Technology Review as top ten Belgian talents in 2017 for developing SensifAI video semantic concept recognition startup.

Lead Organization Name: Quadible

Quadible Ltd is an SME technology company that is based in London, UK. Quadible’s main target is to deliver software products with great impact on the market and drive the technology further to improve people’s lives in a societal manner. Quadible ensures the result of a project by delivering innovative software artifacts and providing efficient solutions for complex projects. The team’s expertise lies on conducting research and developing innovative mobile and wearable technologies, Internet of Things systems, as well as knowledge extraction based on machine-learning and data analytics.

Project: MENTAL: Secure mental condition and behaviour change detection for elderly people

The world’s population is ageing across every country and continent. According to the World Economic Forum, “never before have such large numbers of people reached the older ages (conventionally defined as ages 65 and up)”. New form of medication, vaccines as well as better way of life has led to the increase of the age of the population. In the meantime, elderly people require a larger amount of support from the community and healthcare. This creating large pressure to the national healthcare systems considering that the majority of the actions require healthcare personnel involvement or even 24/7 observation for assistance or daily behaviour monitoring to detect behaviour changes as well as mental conditions. This creates huge amounts of personnel costs, lack of healthcare staff, the potential for human error as the monitoring process is fully human-based and does not allow elderly people to live an independent life in their homes. MENTAL project focuses on improving the detection and prevention of behaviour changes and mental conditions for elderly people, to reduce productivity costs for healthcare organisations, allow them live independently at their homes, while improving the security/privacy and trustworthiness of healthcare solutions. MENTAL will integrate and deploy an AI-based behaviour analysis solution at the GATEKEEPER framework to fully automate the behaviour monitoring process allowing the derivation of fine-grained behavioural information. A 2-week pre-pilot will be performed at the beginning of the project to validate the correctness of the integration. Following, a 10-month pilot will validate the interoperability, scalability and user satisfaction of the MENTAL platform and the GATEKEEPER platform at four pilot sites. Information related to the user experience, service quality etc. will be monitored during the pilots, to measure the success of the project. Dissemination and communication activities will maximise the international outreach of the GATEKEEPER project at a worldwide scale.

Lead Organization Name: PROMPTLY

Is an health analytics company established in 2017, from the ambition of 3 doctors to create an eHealth ecosystem to empower patients in the management of their diseases, while offering a decision support framework to health services providers. Currently, the SME has a young and enthusiast team of healthcare professionals and engineers who understand the healthcare industry. The team of 15 elements has a background in Healthcare Management, Internal Medicine, Surgery, Health Economics, Medical Informatics and Data Science. The healthcare and technology experience is completed by the support of Business Angels, who have +30y of business experience both from within and outside the healthcare industry – PROEF Group (www.proef.com/en).

Project: AI4DM

The AI4DM addresses the GateKeeper scope of delivering an advanced digital solution for personalised early detection and intervention, improving the quality of life of patients, while providing significant efficiency gains to health care services. This is achieved by offering AI predictive modelling services that, by assessing the condition of older adults suffering from diabetes type 2, and under a time sensitive intervention and operational plan, will detect risks from short (hypoglycaemias) to mid-long term (diabetes comorbidities). This will provide the possibility of issuing alarms that may trigger a needed intervention, balanced with the probability of the risk occurring.

Lead Organization Name: NIM Competence Center for Digital Healthcare GmbH

NIM Competence Center for Digital Healthcare GmbH is a SME with headquarters in Berlin, Germany and a branch in Pozzilli, Italy. The main expertise of the company is the Artificial Intelligence-based extraction of biomarkers from unstructured data, with focus on medical images, in particular on Positron Emission Tomography, for the early diagnosis of neurological diseases and cancers. The business area of the company is medical imaging analysis service for hospitals, pharma industry and research centres.  

Project: MENTAL: Radiolytx DOPA

An AI Module for the early diagnosis of PD using EHR unstructured data. In this project we address the GATEKEEPER challenge of increasing insights from Electronic Health Records (EHRs) unstructured data in order to identify novel clinical paths for the risk of PD in the challenging

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