The project aims enhancing cross-sector, international and interdisciplinary collaboration in the area of social robotics technology for care. Are robots ready for society, and is society ready for robots? How can social robots can be included in people’s lives? Robots are increasingly being used in the healthcare sector as a potential solution to the current and future challenges faced by the healthcare sector. Due to the global population ageing, by 2035 the world is projected to lack 12.9 million healthcare professionals (WHO: 2013). Social robots may benefit the quality life and wellbeing of patients, their families and healthcare professionals. Evidence and much of the needed knowledge are still lacking. Strong interdisciplinarity and cross-sectorial research and innovation activity is needed. A knowledge hub for social robotics will be created with a threefold aim: (1) To enhance the competencies of involved staff members, refining and focusing their skills; (2) To build a tri-sectoral network involving academia, industry and users of technology, and (3) to create an enduring network that will outlive the grant funding. The core of the project includes some of the strongest actors in international research, SMEs and user organisations, focusing on three activity lines: technological, sociological, care-and-welfare. To be able to understand the impact of introducing social robots in care, the three areas that will be affected by this technical evolution will be researched: (1) care provided as medical practice; this is the care given to patients in hospitals, clinics, rehabilitation centres and other medical facilities. (2) residential care - this area refers to all care institutions accepting patient/clients as residents: elderly homes, nursing homes, special needs schools for children or adults, etc. (3) family care, investigating how social robots can be implemented in the home, and as a part of domestic life.

Digital healthcare may prevent poor health. Personalised early risk prediction by artificial intelligence can empower citizens to adopt healthier habits and a better lifestyle. This project aims at defining a general personalised early risk prediction model that will be used to support individual preventive measures as well as early intervention. New digital tools are designed to empower both citizens and patients. Furthermore, the impact of the new digital tools on health and care pathways are investigated. Three main scenarios are included: 1. Chronic sun damage and the fight against skin cancer, 2. The late complications of diabetes mellitus and 3. The four main lifestyle risk factors in noncommunicable diseases. In scenario 1, a smartphone application estimates a person`s risk for sun damage and skin cancer. Both healthy persons and skin cancer patients are included. The analysis is based on user-collected data indicating previous and current sun exposure, skin type including a computer-based naevus classification and the family history of skin cancer. Persons at increased risk are educated on healthy sun exposure behaviour including sun screen use. In addition, they are asked to see their doctor for a total body skin examination. In scenario 2, a smartphone application estimates a person`s risk for late complications of diabetes. General lifestyle measures as well as blood sugar levels collected by the patient are used as input for the analysis. Persons at increased risk for complications are given specific advice and are asked to see their doctor. In scenario 3, a web-based tool to collect general lifestyle data in healthy populations is tested, emphasising the four main risk factors: Unhealthy diet, physical inactivity, tobacco use and harmful use of alcohol. All data in the project are analysed in a multidisciplinary approach including medical, sociological and behavioural outcomes.

The vision of ASCLEPIOS is to maximize and fortify the trust of users on cloud-based healthcare services by developing mechanisms for protecting both corporate and personal sensitive data. The core idea of the project is derived from two observations. The first is based on an extensive analysis of the market on currently available cloud-based health services that aim to preserve users’ privacy without sacrificing functionality. From this study, we observed the following: “Once data is placed on the cloud in an unencrypted form or encrypted with a key that is known to the cloud service provider, data privacy becomes an illusion”. The second observation is based on the consideration of the latest advancements in cryptography. More precisely, one of the saddest but at the same time most fascinating things about cryptography is how little cryptography we actually use. While researchers have developed many theoretical models that could enhance the security level of healthcare services, only a rudimentary set of techniques are currently in use. ASCLEPIOS is addressing these limitations by utilizing several modern cryptographic approaches to build a cloud-based eHealth framework that protects users’ privacy and prevents both internal and external attacks. ASCLEPIOS also offers the ability to users to verify the integrity of their medical devices prior using them while at the same time receiving certain guarantees about the trustworthiness of their cloud service provider. Furthermore, ASCLEPIOS offers a novel solution through which healthcare practitioners and medical researchers are able to calculate statistics on medical data in a privacy-preserving way. Finally, a list of activities with the aim to raise security awareness within the healthcare industry will be organized by project. All these results will be showcased by three real-life near production quality demonstrators provided by ASCLEPIOS healthcare partners, involving three leading European hospitals.

The health sector is steadily becoming the de facto target for cyberattacks. Based on the most recent ENISA report at the end of 2018, cybersecurity incidents have shown that the healthcare sector is one of the most vulnerable. Focusing specifically on Electronic Medical Devices (EMD), they suffer from numerous and multi-layered vulnerabilities . Default, weak or no password authentication for remote connections, unencrypted traffic or obsolete and insecure cryptographic algorithms, unsupported operating systems, outdated, unmanaged and vulnerable software are among the most serious problems that jeopardise both their smooth operation and the data aggregated and stored. The vision of HEIR is to provide a thorough threat identification and cybersecurity knowledge base system addressing both local (in the hospital / medical centre) and global (including different stakeholders) levels, that comprises the following pillars: (i) Real time threat hunting services, facilitated by advanced machine learning technologies, supporting the identification of the most common threats in electronic medical systems based on widely accepted methodologies such as the OWASP Top 10 Security Risks and the ENISA Top 15 Threats; (ii) Sensitive data trustworthiness sharing facilitated by the HEIR privacy aware framework; (iii) Innovative Benchmarking based on the calculation of the Risk Assessment of Medical Applications (RAMA) score, that will measure the security status of every medical device and provide thorough vulnerability assessment of hospitals and medical centres; (iv) The delivery of an Observatory for the Security of Electronic Medical Devices; an intelligent knowledge base accessible by different stakeholders, providing advanced visualisations for each threat identified in RAMA and facilitating global awareness on EMD-related threats. Last, HEIR will set up a broad European network for establishing good security practice in all regulatory frameworks to reduce market access.