The Project eBrain-Health will deliver a distributed research platform for modeling and simulating complex neurobiological phenomena of human brain function and dysfunction in a data protection compliant environment. It will provide thousands of multilevel virtual brains from patients and healthy human controls for research and innovation. Brain data from multiple sources will be pre-processed. Solving the societal grand challenge of dementia is a big task. Yet it appears feasible in a collective approach. Therefore, we will build an interdisciplinary digital twin for dementia for modeling and simulating complex phenomena at the service of research infrastructure communities. EBRAINS-Health-Cloud will offer end-to-end services for personalized complex brain modeling and simulations in distributed e-infrastructures with data protection by design and by default and simulation-ready human multiscale brain data that range from molecular (genomics, proteomics, metabolomics) and cellular to electrophysiology and imaging to behavioural, clinical, life-style and environmental data as well as data from wearables. Brain data are pre-processed and annotated such that they all relate to a common reference 3D brain space. EBRAINS-Health-Cloud constitutes a blend of three large-scale research programs: the FET Flagship Human Brain Project with its EBRAINS Research Infrastructure, the EOSC project Virtual Brain Cloud with its Virtual Research Environment for sensitive data and the H2020 project AI-MIND with intelligent tools for dementia risk estimation. The project will have synergies to topics of the Digital Europe Program, such as artificial intelligence, cybersecurity and supercomputing and the Health Data Space. EBRAINS-Health-Cloud offers a next generation clinical research infrastructure and creates an open yet protected space for groundbreaking digital health innovation by the research infrastructure communities comprising academia and the private sector.

WiBEC (Wireless In-Body Environment Communications) is an Innovative Training Network for 16 young researchers, who will be recruited and trained in coordinated manner by Academia, Industry, and Medical Centres. This training will address the Social, Health, and Technology challenges of the H2020:Wireless In-Body Devices. WiBEC’s main objective is to provide high quality and innovative doctoral training to develop the wireless technologies for novel implantable devices that will contribute to the improvement in quality and efficacy of healthcare. Two devices will be used as a focus for the individual researcher’s projects; cardiovascular implants and ingestible capsules to investigate gastro intestinal problems. These devices will enable medical professionals to have timely clinical information at the point of care. The medical motivation is to increase survival rates and improvement of health outcomes with easy and fast diagnosis and treatment. The goal for homecare services is to improve quality of life and independence for patients by enabling ambient assisted living (AAL) at home. In this particular ETN, inter-sectoral and multi-discipline work is essential, as the topic requires cooperation between medical and engineering institutions and industry. This aspect is fulfilled with the participation of two reference hospitals, two medical device manufacturers and three top ranked universities in Europe, covering complementary aspects of the in-body wireless device field. Concerning future employment perspectives; surgery and medical assistance is rapidly becoming more technological than it is today, and a large number of experts combining engineering and medical skills will be required in Europe to enable novel paradigms like AAL to be realised. The ESRs who join this ETN will acquire diverse skills that will enable them to occupy privileged positions to join and promote EU leadership in ICT for Health.

Every year, 1.3 million Europeans have a stroke and one million ultimately die of stroke. One third of stroke patients remain dependent on the help of others. The annual costs for stroke care in Europe are estimated at € 64.1 billion. Stroke incidence increases almost exponentially with age, and the personal, societal, and economic burden of stroke is therefore largely driven by its frequent occurrence in the elderly. The elderly have been strongly underrepresented in previous stroke trials and treatment guidelines have no recommendations specific to this important group. Elderly patients are at the highest risk of complications after stroke, such as infections, fever, and dysphagia. These complications are strongly and independently associated with a higher risk of death or dependency. We will perform a pragmatic, randomised, open clinical trial with blinded outcome assessment in 3800 patients with acute stroke aged 66 years or older, to assess whether pharmacological prevention of infections and fever, and early management of dysphagia, will reduce the risk of death, poor functional outcome, and poor quality of life, and lead to reductions in the costs of stroke care throughout Europe. Patients will be randomised using a factorial design to preventive treatment for 4 days with ceftriaxone, paracetamol, and/or metoclopramide, or to ‘standard care’ alone. The primary outcome is functional outcome at 3 months, assessed with the modified Rankin Scale (mRS), and analysed with ordinal logistic regression. The study will have 90% power to detect a statistically significant shift towards a favourable outcome, assuming a 5% absolute increase in the proportion of patients with a good outcome (mRS 0 to 2) in the intervention group, compared with controls. This simple, safe, and generally available treatment strategy has the potential to lead to an annual reduction of over 25 000 elderly Europeans being dead or dependent as a result of stroke, at very low costs.