Recipient organisationUniversity of ManchesterSource-published name: The University of Manchester
Funding£1.5M
PeriodJan 2024 — Dec 2027
In plain English
AI plain-English summary
A pan-European network of doctors, AI engineers, and social scientists is building a unified digital framework to predict, monitor, and slow the progression of dementia and frailty in older adults. Currently, care for age-related decline is fragmented. A person’s medical records, wearable sensor data, and daily behaviour patterns exist in separate silos, making it nearly impossible for clinicians to spot early warning signs or tailor interventions. COMFORTAGE aims to solve this by creating a standardised “Holistic Health Record” that merges biobank samples, clinical histories, real-world sensor data, and even inputs from smart-home robots. Explainable AI will then generate personalised risk predictions and recommendations—for example, alerting a memory clinic when a patient’s walking speed or sleep patterns shift in ways that signal impending decline. If successful, the framework could shift dementia and frailty care from reactive crisis management to proactive, community-based prevention. Instead of waiting for a fall or a diagnosis, a person might receive tailored advice on exercise, social engagement, or medication adjustments weeks or months earlier. The project also integrates social innovations to combat isolation, meaning the impact extends beyond clinical metrics to how people actually live and interact in their homes and neighbourhoods.
View original technical description
COMFORTAGE is a joint effort of medical experts (i.e., neurologists, psychiatrists, neuropsychologists, nurses, memory clinics), social scientists and humanists, technical experts (i.e., data scientists, AI experts, robotic experts) and Digital Innovation Hubs to establish a pan European framework for Community-based, Integrated and People-Centric prevention, monitoring and progression managing solutions for age-related diseases and disabilities. The project’s framework will be empowered by a unique combination and integration of: (i) Medical/clinical innovations (e.g., novel approaches to risk factor analysis and personalized prediction, AI-based medical devices, integrated data sources of age-related clinical evidence, and evidence-based Healthcare Technology Assessment (HTA)), (ii) Cutting edge AI innovations (e.g., explainable AI (XAI), secure AI, serious games, Patient Digital Twins, Virtual Assistive technologies) for trusted, accurate, secure and personalized clinical decision making, (iii) Digital Innovation Hubs (e.g. Smart Homes, robotics and Living Labs) to facilitate and promote research activities in the health and wellbeing domain, and (iv) social innovations for promoting innovative views and co-creating new or improved solutions for assistance and improvement of social integration and interaction. COMFORTAGE will facilitate the integration, harmonization, and management of a host of different data sources, including biobanks, cohorts, medical records, longitudinal observational studies, real-world data about patients, as well of alternative secondary data sources, such as sensors, wearables and mobiles in a standardized structure called Holistic Health Records (HHRs). COMFORTAGE will become a catalyst to help prevent, monitor, and manage progression of age-related diseases and disabilities, especially of dementia and frailty, based on high end research and analysis of the utilization of the aforementioned technologies
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