A research team from the University of Warwick has been awarded €13m for the ODIN project, which will explore the use of robotics and Artificial Intelligence (AI) in a clinical setting.
The European Commission has invested €40m to foster research that may design the hospital of the future. As part of this funding initiative, the ODIN project will explore the use of robots and AI to help ease the pressure on hospitals during the COVID-19 pandemic and to support nations to prepare for future crises.
EU hospitals were unprepared to fight the COVID-19 pandemic, largely due to the number of ICU beds i being reduced by 75% in the past 30 years, and a lack of funding in territory healthcare services in response to demographic challenges.
Leader of the ODIN project, Dr Leandro Pecchia, from the School of Engineering at the University of Warwick said: “We have identified 11 hospital critical challenges, which ODIN will face combining robotics, Internet of Things (IoT) and AI to empower workers, medical locations, logistics and interaction with the territory.”
About the ODIN project
The researchers will work with three 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. The ODIN project aims to introduce autonomous and collaborative robots for enhancing hospital efficacy and safety. It will also enhance medical locations and medical device management with IoT and video analytics.
Dr Pecchia continued: “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.”
