In today’s climate, hospitals must increase their efficiency and productivity, and boost quality and safety standards, while also containing and reducing costs. However, this cannot be an untaught linear reduction. For example, the number of ICU beds per million EU habitants was reduced by 75% in the past 30 years and there is a need for investment in regional healthcare services due to democratic challenges. This has left EU hospitals completely unprepared for the COVID-19 pandemic, proving that hospital budget cuts must be complemented with major organisational restructuring that makes use of innovative technologies.
ODIN will address 11 critical hospital challenges that have been identified by the consortium, by combining the application of robotics, internet of things (IoT) and artificial intelligence (AI) to empower workers, medical locations, logistics and interaction within the regions.
ODIN will deploy technologies along three lines of intervention: empowering workers (AI, cybernetics and bionics); introducing autonomous and collaborative robots; and enhancing medical locations with IoT. These will be piloted in six hospitals in Spain, France, Italy, Poland, The Netherlands and Germany, via seven use cases spanning clinical to logistic, including patient management, disaster preparedness and hospital resiliency. The ODIN pilot will be a federation of multicentre, longitudinal cohort studies, demonstrating the safety, efficiency and cost-effectiveness of ODIN technologies for the enhancement of hospital safety, productivity and quality. Use-case protocols will be approved by the local hospital ethical committees in order to assure the highest quality of the study, while providing a pragmatic solution for the scaling-up of the ODIN technological solutions and business models in a variety of local ecosystems.
ODIN’s vision is that as ‘evidence-based medicine’ revolutionised medicine with data-driven procedures, so data-driven management enabled by Industry 4.0 technology can revolutionise hospital management.
TWI Hellas contributes to ODIN with robot cognition, mapping and social navigation, and is also involved in platform privacy, security and trust mechanisms, and in iterated integration and preliminary validation of robotics system.
Partners: 21 partners from 12 countries
ODIN is funded by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 programme under the ICT topic “AI for the smart hospital of the future”.