Personal Health Interfaces Leveraging Human-Machine Natural Interactions

Project Information

PhilHumans

Grant agreement ID: 812882

DOI

10.3030/812882

Project closed

EC signature date 28 November 2018

Start date 1 January 2019

End date 31 October 2023

Funded under

• EXCELLENT SCIENCE - Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions

Total cost

€ 2 135 436,12

EU contribution

€ 2 135 436,12

Coordinated by

PHILIPS ELECTRONICS NEDERLAND BV
Netherlands

Periodic Reporting for period 2 - PhilHumans (Personal Health Interfaces Leveraging Human-Machine Natural Interactions)

Reporting period: 2021-01-01 to 2023-10-31

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

The PhilHumans project has trained a next generation of young researchers in innovative Artificial Intelligence (AI) and establish user interaction with their personal health devices in an advanced and intuitive way. The project explored cutting-edge research topics related to AI-supported human-machine interfaces for personal health services. PhilHumans has committed to responsible research and innovation to establish disruptive and innovative technology for AI-assisted human-machines interfaces, employing language technology, cognitive computing, computer vision, and machine learning (ML). The technology can be applied in a number of personal health contexts and extend or being coupled with Home healthcare, as well as in additional fields such as population health management and provide several benefits to users making sure science and research is conducted with and for society.

The training and research network with 8 ESR in the project explored AI knowledge and expertise from Natural Language Generation (NLG) & Processing (NLP), Cognitive Computing, Computer Vision, ML focusing on 5 research objectives. Based on sound career development plans, and coached by experienced supervisors a training was offered by leading image analysis research groups from Philips (global leader in medical imaging) and the Eindhoven university of Technology (worldwide recognized authority in education and research on image analysis, esp. on MRI) and supported by researchers from leading universities like University of Cagliari, University of Catania and University of Aberdeen. After finalisation of their PhD the researchers plan for a next career step in research or industry depending on their affinity.

The project has contributed to the development of innovative technologies, data sets, and application concepts in the area of personal health interfaces. The work has been documented in the top conferences and journals in the area and many of the results, including data sets developed in the project, and software repositories, are available for the further research and development work in the community.

Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far

Overall, during the 2nd phase of the project, the work carried out has been in line with the Annex 1 to the Grant Agreement. The progress achieved in the training of ESRs and in the research activity is satisfactory. The 2nd reporting period started on 1/1/2021 and ended 31/10/2023.
WP1 - Conceptualization
The activities and deliverable of WP1 deliverables were concluded during the first reporting.
WP2 - Development & customization
In WP2 the data collection using heterogeneous sources is executed, and additionally the data analysis and algorithms, formulation of results, as well as the result validation.
WP3 - Evaluation & definition of future scenario
In this WP the ESRs have identified sustainable and effective innovation priorities in AI-assisted human machine interfaces, and formulate strategies and actions to enact them, focussing to the EU market context.
WP4 - Interdisciplinary enhancement
The research activity was supported by a set of Interdisciplinary actions like training events and meetings. There has been an enhancement approach that has been carried out by all the ESRs and interdisciplinary workshops where all the ESRs participated.
WP5 - Training
ESRs have been recruited with a process managed by the partner’s own HR departments, the ESRs had a chance to do virtual meetings for networking and to align on their projects using classic teleconference platforms (e.g. MS Teams) and social networks (e.g. ESRs group on WhatsApp). The ESRs have presented their project to the 1st Workshop On Smart Personal Health Interfaces (Smartphil) which has been organized by the consortium on March 17-20, 2020 (Virtually due to COVID-19).
The ESRs have participated to conferences and reading groups to advance their background and knowledge on topics of the interest for their projects.
WP6 - Dissemination, Communication & engagement
WP6 continued their activities during the 2nd phase of the project. The main communication channels, the webpage and the twitter account were created. The dissemination wave continued with activities that included workshops, clustering events, publications, stakeholder identification among others.

Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)

In the ESR1 project on insight mining we have been able to develop and propose a generic framework and several variations from conventional data mining and text generation methods and demonstrated the results in conferences. The framework was used in several studies published in journals and conferences which have been summarized in the PhD Thesis of the ERS1 which is currently being finalized.
The work in ESR2 project on therapeutic conversational systems the research on assessment of empathy, and generation of empathetic responses by a dialog system has been demonstrated in first publications and real-time demonstrations. One of the contributions of this activity is an annotated corpus therapeutic conversations that will be made publicly available for the research community. The work led to several articles and a PhD Thesis which was successfully defended in September 2023.
The ESR3 project on deep program induction is advancing the science in automatic health program control and has produced several publications and open-source software packages. The work led to several publications in the area of automatic programming in healthcare area and a PhD thesis to be defended in the Spring 2024.
The ESR4 work has focused on integration of knowledge models into clinical text classification using the recently introduced K-BERT language model. The results of the work were reported in journal and conference publications and the PhD thesis of ESR4 approved in Spring 2023.
The work of ESR5 in first person vision has produced first publications and software. The method as tested in the HomeLab environment at Philips Research, which also lead to a publication in Spring 2023. The PhD thesis covering this work was successfully defended in the beginning of 2023.
One of the most important results of the ESR6 work on scene understanding is an extensive literature survey paper, with more than 330 citations, which has been accepted for publication in a prestigious journal in the robotics and automation domain. The original ESR6 unfortunately left the project but the new ESR6 hired in place has already published his first paper and is on the path of defending his PhD thesis by the end of 2024.
ESR7 project on personalized health communication has led to publications and a concrete demonstration of the envisioned solution as a conversational interface for nutritional tracking and counseling. The work led to several publications and the successful defense of the PhD thesis of ESR7 in August 2023.
The ESR8 project produced an initial literature survey but unfortunately the contrac5t of the original ESR was terminated. The new ESR8 started in 2022 and she is currently working in a PhD project. However, it is not currently know how the funding of her PhD project can be secured beyond the end of PhilHumans.

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