Urinary incontinence (UI), considered as a disease according to the World Health Organization (WHO), is not a life-threatening condition, but causes a very negative impact on daily living and quality of life. 56 million European citizens are affected by UI, which represents a serious impairment to the quality of their professional and personal life. Recent statistics show that 346 million people worldwide experienced any type of UI in 2008, which will increase to 420 million by 2018. In addition, when UI appears it is maintained throughout a lifetime if no solution is provided, causing huge social and economic costs (nearly $10 billion is lost every year in direct treatment cost and lost productivity due to UI). The main objective of WOMEN-UP project is to improve the quality of life of urinary incontinence patients through a holistic and cost-effective ICT-solution, allowing for the self management of the chronic UI disease via a decision support system and a secure remote medical supervision. This general objective is divided into the following specific objectives: -To improve women’s’ health by providing lifestyle changes through an integral and multifactorial treatment. -To develop an ICT-based system to facilitate a holistic solution for a conservative home treatment: Lifestyle interventions and pelvic floor muscle training with remote clinical assessment and supervision. -To make eHealth tools for UI more effective, user-friendly and widely accepted by involving professionals and patients in strategy, design and implementation. -To assess the cost-efficiency of the proposed ICT-based solution for significantly reducing health system costs by up to 72% -To develop an innovative approach for the supervision of Pelvic Floor Muscles Training -To increase patient The project WOMEN-UP will be developed by a consortium that brings together 9 partners from 6 different EU member states (Spain, Finland, Netherlands, Czech Republic, Romania, and Switzerland).

Obstructive sleep apnea (OSA) is associated with various negative health consequences including increased risk of heart disease, hypertension and daytime sleepiness causing road accidents. The economic burden of OSA is rising as almost 1 billion people worldwide are estimated to have OSA. The current diagnostic metric, however, relates poorly to these symptoms and comorbidities. It merely measures the frequency of breathing cessations without assessing OSA severity in any other physiologically relevant way. Furthermore, the clinical methods for analyzing PSG signals are outdated, expensive and laborious. Due to this, the majority of OSA patients remain without diagnosis or have an inaccurate diagnosis leading to sub-optimal treatment. Thus, it is evident that more personalized diagnostics are required including predictive and preventive health care and patient participation. The SLEEP REVOLUTION aims to develop machine learning techniques to better estimate OSA severity and treatment needs to improve health outcomes and quality of life. These techniques are implemented to high-end wearables developed in this project to alleviate the costs and increase the availability of PSGs. Finally, we aim to design a digital platform that functions as a bridge between researchers, patients and healthcare professionals. We will achieve these ambitious goals throughout extensive collaboration between sleep specialists, computer scientists and industry partners. The collaboration network consists of over 30 sleep centers working together to provide the needed retrospective data (over 10.000 sleep studies). The multi-center prospective trials involve experts and end-users to assess and validate the new SLEEP REVOLUTION diagnostic algorithms, wearables and platforms. With the commitment of the European Sleep Research Society and Assembly of National Sleep Societies (over 8000 members), we have the unique possibility to create new standardized guidelines for sleep medicine in the EU.

Chronic angina pectoris is a debilitating chronic disease, a subgroup of these patients suffers from refractory angina which unfortunately can’t be controlled by medical therapy (angioplasty or surgery). Refractory angina is a substantial burden on the individual and healthcare system, in Europe there are 100,000 new cases per year, annual mortality of these patients is relatively low (<4%) thus refractory angina patients suffer multiple hospitalizations and low levels of health-related quality of life. The ReGenHeart project is based on extensive preclinical work and a phase I safety, feasibility and dose-finding clinical study recently completed by the consortium. The project will conduct a multicentre, randomized, placebo-controlled, double-blinded Phase II clinical study to provide proof of concept and clinical validation for a new, percutaneous, cost-efficient therapy for refractory angina patients. Using our optimized catheter-mediated intramyocardial approach with AdenoVEGF-D, which has never been used in man before our phase I trial, we aim to induce regenerative changes supported by therapeutic angiogenesis in the affected area of a patient's heart and, in a single procedure, reduce the burden on the individual and their health service. The proposed trial is ready to proceed, subject to final regulatory approval in the seven clinical centres. 120 CCS class 2-3 refractory angina patients will be recruited, which will allow us to assess the benefits of therapy to patients who still have potential to respond to the regenerative therapy. Patients will be randomized 2:1 to either the gene therapy or placebo arms. Trial follow up, at 6 and 12 months, will assess how far they can walk in 6 minutes (primary endpoint) and also by their CCS angina score, quality of life, so-called MACE endpoints and several advanced PET and MRI imaging endpoints.

There is an international imperative to improve healthcare through health service research, including nursing research and new innovations. This EU-RISE project “Excellent research and expertise of quality of cancer care by internationally trained staff (INEXCA)” aims to utilize expertise across the globe to improve research, researcher training and care of cancer patients, family caregivers and patient and public involvement through international and intersectoral collaboration and staff exchange. The ultimate objectives are to create innovative opportunities to improve research and researchers’ skills and increase knowledge transfer from research to practice and business. The participants in the project representing academic, non-academic and clinical settings as well as information technology industry and health-related business experts from Belgium, Denmark, Finland, Italy, Great Britain and United States of America have enormous and interdisciplinary competences of their specializing areas in research methodology, quality of care, cancer care, patient involvement, family care givers and information technology in academic, non-academic and clinical settings. The participating organizations will bring their best know-how through staff’s secondments, workshops, training courses, conferences, publications and other activities. An innovative ICT platform will be developed for sharing information and knowledge. In total, 34 academic and non-academic staff members will be involved in this INEXCA project for 263 months. The participants’ synergies and complementarities from different disciplines, experiences, methodological advancements as well as clinical practice will be fully in use. The planned secondments will offer the best opportunity to get the best outcomes for patients, families, EU citizens as well as researchers. Descriptors: HEALTH SERVICES, HEALTH CARE RESEARCH