Hearing Loss (HL) is one of the most prevalent chronic diseases and the 5th cause of disability. HL increases the risk of cognitive decline, mental illness, and depression, and leads to social isolation, unemployment/early retirement, loss of income and work discrimination. The pre-eminent management strategy for HL is the provision of Hearing Aids (HAs), although their use is often problematic, costly and with poor overall benefits. The holistic management of HL requires appropriate public health policies for HL prevention, early diagnosis, long-term treatment and rehabilitation; detection and prevention of cognitive decline; protection from noise; and socioeconomic inclusion of HL patients. However, currently the evidential basis for forming such policies is limited. Holistic HL management policies require the analysis of heterogeneous data, including HA usage, noise (TTS) episodes, audiological, physiological, cognitive, clinical and medication, personal, behavioural, life style, occupational and environmental data. EVOTION has access to big datasets of such data from five different organisations and will support their continuous update by real time data produced by sensors and HAs used by HL patients. To utilise these data in forming holistic HL management policies, EVOTION aims to develop an integrated platform supporting: (a) the analysis of the above datasets to enable the identification of causal and other effects amongst them, (b) policy decision making focusing on the selection of effective interventions related to the holistic management of HL, based on the outcomes of (a) and the formulation of related public health policies, and (c) the specification and monitoring of such policies in a sustainable manner. To achieve this aim, EVOTION also brings together public health policy organisations, experts and authorities supporting the formation of the targeted policies and the validation of the EVOTION support for it.

In recent years, the majority of the world's Critical Infrastructures CIs evolved to become more flexible, cost efficient and able to offer better services and conditions for business opportunities. Towards this evolution, CIs and companies offering CI services had to adopt many of the recent advances of the Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) field. This adaptation however, was rather hasty and without thorough evaluation of its impact on security. The result was to leave CIs vulnerable to a who the new set of threats and attacks that impose high levels of risk to the public safety, economy and welfare of the population. In so far, the main approach to protect CIs is to handle them as comprehensive entities and offer them a complete solution for their overall infrastructures and systems (IT&OT departments). However Complete CI protection solutions exist in the form of individual products from individual companies. These products integrate only and tools/solutions designed by the same company, thus offering limited technical solutions. The main aim of CIPSEC is to create a unified security framework that orchestrates state-of-the-art heterogeneous security products to offer high levels of protection in IT (information technology) and OT (operational technology) departments of CIs. As part of this framework CIPSEC will offer a complete security ecosystem of additional services that can support the proposed technical solutions to work reliably and at professional quality. These services include vulnerability tests and recommendations, key personnel training courses, public-private partnerships (PPPs) forensics analysis, standardization and protection against cascading effects. All solutions and services will be validated in three pilots performed in three different CI environments (transportation, health, environment). CIPSEC will also develop a marketing strategy for optimal positioning of its solutions in the CI security market.