IMPACT DIABETES B2B will demonstrate the real-world implementation of an evidence-based, low-resource system-level intervention for healthy gestational weight gain and early prevention of maternal and child diabetes, overweight and obesity when delivered ‘at scale’ across antenatal settings. Gestational diabetes affects up to 18% of pregnancies worldwide and is an increasing health problem for both mothers and babies. By identifying those most at risk of developing gestational diabetes and working with them through personalised health coaching delivered via smartphone App, this project will engage, motivate and empower this target group to lead healthier lives for improved wellbeing and pregnancy outcomes. This project will demonstrate implementation within 3 European countries and Australia with clear line-of-sight on future scale-up across different contexts and resource settings via its innovative implementation toolkit and workshops for dissemination and exploitation. Pregnancy is a unique time in life with potential to influence maternal health, and the health of the next generation. IMPACT DIABETES B2B delivers breakthrough research in nutrition, exercise and behaviour change leading to an implementable low-resource system-level intervention. The personalised feedback will empower women to manage their health, delivering cost-effective management of excess gestational and post-pregnancy weight gain to: improve pregnancy and postpartum outcomes; improve utilisation of healthcare services; and encourage ongoing maternal health with sustainable impact for mother and family. Expertise in implementation science, lifestyle change, health psychology, mHealth technology, health economics and health service delivery will lead this mixed methods project. The project will co-design the intervention system, with end-user context and management explored throughout. The work will evaluate clinical, economic and implementation outcomes to inform future practice and policy.

This Project aims to address an increasingly pressing global challenge: How to achieve the EU’s development goals and the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals, while meeting the global target of staying within two degrees global warming and avoid transgressing other planetary boundaries. EU policies must align with sustainable development goals (Article 11 TFEU). The impacts of climate change and global loss of natural habitat undermine the progress achieved by pursuing the Millennium Development Goals and threaten the realisation of EU development policy goals. Our focus is the role of EU’s public and private market actors. They have a high level of interaction with actors in emerging and developing economies, and are therefore crucial to achieving the EU’s development goals. However, science does not yet cater for insights in how the regulatory environment influences their decision-making, nor in how we can stimulate them to make development-friendly, environmentally and socially sustainable decisions. Comprehensive, ground-breaking research is necessary into the regulatory complexity in which EU private and public market actors operate, in particular concerning their interactions with private and public actors in developing countries. Our Consortium, leading experts in law, economics, and applied environmental and social science, is able to analyse this regulatory complexity in a transdisciplinary and comprehensive perspective, both on an overarching level and in depth, in the form of specific product life-cycles: ready-made garments and mobile phones. We bring significant new evidence-based insights into the factors that enable or hinder coherence in EU development policy; we will advance the understanding of how development concerns can be successfully integrated in non-development policies and regulations concerning market actors; and we provide tools for improved PCD impact assessment as well as for better corporate sustainability assessment.

CO-CREATE aims to reduce childhood obesity and its co-morbidities by working with adolescents, to create, inform and disseminate obesity-preventive evidence-based policies. The project applies a systems approach to provide a better understanding of how factors associated with obesity interact at various levels. The project focus on adolescence as the specific target group, a crucial age with increasing autonomy and the next generation of adults, parents and policymakers, and thus important agents for change. CO-CREATE involve and empower adolescents and youth organizations to foster a participatory process of identifying and formulating relevant policies, deliberating such options with other private and public actors, promoting relevant policy agenda and tools and strategies for implementation. CO-CREATE strengthen interdisciplinary research and have an inclusive multi-actor approach with involvement of academics, policy makers, civil society, relevant industry and market actors to ensure long-lasting implementation of the results. The project reflects and builds on a number of existing initiatives and platforms, including the extensive research activity from consortium members. The project has a strong gender profile and consider the relevance of geographic, socio-economic, behaviour and cultural factors. CO-CREATE engages international partners from different policy-contexts in Europe, Australia, South Africa and the US. Applying large-scale datasets, policy monitoring tools, novel analytical approaches and youth involvement will provide new efficient strategies, tools and programmes for promoting sustainable and healthy dietary behaviours and lifestyles. The generated knowledge and innovative tools for assessing actual policy implementation, strategies for empowering adolescents; and strategies for identifying, implementing and monitoring relevant policy programmes are applicable to stakeholders involved in the European efforts to tackle childhood obesity.

The Internet of Things (IoT) brings opportunities for creating new services and products, reducing costs for societies, increasing the service level for the citizens in a number of areas, and changing how services are sold and consumed. Despite these opportunities, current information system architectures create obstacles that must be addressed for leveraging the full potential of IoT. One of the most critical obstacles are the ‘vertical silos’ that shape today’s IoT because they constitute a serious impediment to the creation of cross-domain, cross-platform and cross-organisational applications and services. Those silos also hamper developers from producing new added value across multiple platforms due to the lack of interoperability and openness. bIoTope provides the necessary Standardized Open APIs for enabling horizontal interoperability between silos. Such horizontal interoperability makes it possible to develop Systems of Systems where cross-domain information from platforms, devices and other information sources can be accessed when and as needed. bIoTope-enabled Systems can seamlessly exploit all available information, which makes them smart in the sense that they can take or propose the most appropriate actions depending on the current User’s or Object’s Context/Situation, and even learn from experience. bIoTope capabilities lay the foundation for open innovation ecosystems where companies can innovate both by the creation of new software components for IoT ecosystems, as well as create new Platforms for Connected Smart Objects with minimal investment. Large-scale pilots implemented in smart cities will provide both social, technical and business proofs-of-concept for such IoT ecosystems. This is feasible because the bIoTope consortium combines unique IoT experience, commercial solution providers and end-users, thus ensuring the high quality and efficiency of the results and implementations.