The first white paper of the Health.E lighthouse “Emerging Medical Domains for the ECS industry” was launched at EFECS 2020.
This white paper discusses the thirteen identified medical domains and lists the open technology platform needed to accelerate innovation in these emerging fields.
Given the global scale of the pandemic, Electronic Components and Systems (ECS) and especially Artificial Intelligence (AI) are playing and will continue to play a crucial role in addressing COVID-19 and future outbreaks. The successful deployment of artificial intelligence relies on two pillars: availability of computing power, and access to reliable data. Recent advances in sensor technologies and low-power, high performance miniaturized computing devices (so called “edge computing”) are taking AI to the next step. AI helps researchers from all over the world to advance scientific research to study and understand COVID-19.
AI had begun to play a significant role in the healthcare domain in the last decade. Now urged by the need to contain Covid-19, all actors including governments, public agencies, large enterprises, research and technology organisations as well as SME’s are teaming up nationally and across borders to increase collaborative research and innovation in AI to speed up the process of finding a cure for COVID-19. To support this international collaborative innovation, the funding programmes H2020, ECSEL JU and EUREKA are launching calls including AI technology to speed up breakthrough in medical discoveries and actionable findings to fight COVID-19.
Recent events have shown the importance of AI use during this crisis; advancements in AI applications such as data analytics, natural language processing (NLP), machine learning, deep learning and chatbots have not only helped to identify, track and forecast the impact of the pandemic but also to support the allocation of resources in hospital, to diagnose patients and search curative treatment as well as to provide real-time information. Though AI technologies cannot replicate human intelligence, it demonstrates the potential that a new technology can offer in combination with human expertise.
Read the full white paper here.