Prof. Wei Chen from the School of Information Science and Technology of Fudan University has successfully participated in the EU H2020 HEART project. On July 6^th, 2021, the final conference of the prestigious European research project "HEART" on the use of Information & Communication Technology (ICT) applied to health took place online and marked the conclusion of the initiative coordinated by the University of Macerata and funded by the European Commission within the framework of Horizon 2020 program, Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions, Innovative Training Network.

The conference was an opportunity to present the project results and to discuss possible future developments of the activities carried out in the last four years by the University of Macerata with the multinational company Philips (Health division), the Catholic University of Leuven in Belgium and other prestigious European and Chinese partners, like University of Chinese Academy of Science and Fudan University.

HEART was one of the first international industrial doctorate project, funded by the European Commission, which was able to integrate engineering, legal and economic knowledge in the field of Internet of Things applied to health with a highly interdisciplinary approach.

Prof. Wei Chen from the School of Information Science and Technology of Fudan University participated in the HEART project as a key Chinese partner. Furthermore, Prof. Wei Chen as the consortium leader have conducted and recently completed a collaborative project of HEART, the China-EU Cooperation project, supported by the National Key R&D Program of China, entitled Health-IoT: Health-related Activity Recognition System Based on IoT and Data Fusion.

The relevance of this innovative approach has been further confirmed by the pandemic emergency, which has effectively limited normal access to people's health services for many months and has made even more evident the need for technologies ensuring remote monitoring of vital signs such as blood pressure, heart rate, respiration or blood saturation.

Another peculiarity of the project was its international dimension, which has crossed European borders, both for having trained six young PhD students coming from China, South Korea, India, and Ukraine, and for having analyzed the challenges of European and Chinese health systems.

HEART is a successful case of the collaboration between the industrial sector and the universities, which has been able to reaffirm the role of the socio-humanistic and engineering disciplines in the processes of innovation and development.

As Prof. Francesca Spigarelli, scientific coordinator of the project, remarked at the conclusion of the conference "the closure of a project is always a moment of sadness, but in the case of HEART there is also a strong awareness of the importance of the work carried out together with partners and the certainty that this will translate into new opportunities for collaboration”.

NOTE FOR THE PUBLISHER :

This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement No 766139.

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