What are the technological megatrends in the health sector? What can we contribute in Bochum? We identify trends and create platforms for interdisciplinary exchange, cooperation, and technology transfer. We bring together suitable partners and implement projects, including project management and finding public funding. In this way, scientific findings from Bochum's universities become marketable products on site.

The Health Campus Bochum agency is constantly looking for promising projects. Do you have an idea or are you looking for a project partner? Talk to us.

Project title: Digital Health Factory Ruhr
Project duration: 3 + 3 years starting 09/2022
Project volume: € 15 million (BMBF funding line WIR!)
Project management: Leif Grundmann and Berit Schoppen, MedEcon Ruhr

Project description:
With the highest share of total employment and in particular a dynamic digital health sector, which now boasts many leading companies and strong scientific and clinical contexts, the healthcare industry plays an important role in the long-lasting structural change of the Ruhr region.

Challenges in health care are related to the structure of the Ruhr conurbation and its diversity of cities and districts as well as the people living here.

An alliance of almost 50 partners from the digital health sector, health care, science, and municipalities thus builds on the strengths of the digital health sector by developing digital solutions and products for health care in conurbations and profiling the Ruhr region as an innovative reference region for this.

As an alliance partner, the Health Campus Bochum agency contributes its own expertise and networks and thus supports the development of digital solutions for healthcare.

Project Title: CovidDataNet.NRW
Project duration: 1 August 2021 - 31 December 2022
Project volume: € 3,204,115.59 
Project management: Dr. Adamzik, University Hospital Knappschaftskrankenhaus Bochum

Project description:
Since December 2019, the novel coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 has been spreading around the world, leading to a global pandemic. While suffering from the Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19), approximately 5-10% of patients developed sepsis. Intensive medical treatment is therefore necessary, placing a heavy burden on the highly specialised intensive care units. Due to the novelty of the virus, reliable data on the treatment of COVID-19 are scarce. However, accurate prediction of disease progression could lead to better management of patient flows and help reduce mortality. Personalised therapies are therefore necessary to increase the survival probability of patients and to minimise long-term consequences (long COVID).

Within the CovidDataNet.NRW, an interdisciplinary team from the hospital, research, and industrial sectors is working together on a solution. The team already has experience with cross-site networking of university hospitals in NRW and has thus created a structure for linking and digitising clinical and molecular data. The CovidDataNet.NRW project is now building on this expertise. To relieve the burden on intensive care units, they want to create an AI-based early classification systems to generate treatment groups. This allows for allocating patients to intensive care units specialised in their symptoms. In a second step, identifying COVID-19 subtypes by means of AI can help predict disease progression in a defined way in the future and thus offer personalised therapies.

The result will be a structured collection of clinical data from COVID-19 patients. Based on this data, an immunological and molecular characterisation is carried out in parallel and an unsupervised clustering algorithm (artificial intelligence) helps evaluate the collected data and to divide patients into subgroups. Defined clinical parameters thus help to predict the course of the disease. In the future, this will enable individualised treatment and thus prevent mortality and late complications.

Project title: humAIne
Project duration: April 2021- March 2025 (option to extend until March 2026)
Project volume: 8 million euros (BMBF funding)
Project management: Dr. Uta Wilkens, Institute of Labour Studies, Ruhr University Bochum

Project description:
HUMAINE is a funded expertise centre for researching and establishing human-centred work with AI. In addition to seven pilot applications from industry and the healthcare sector, a regional network for future work with AI is being established.

We are currently in a field in flux spawned by developments in artificial intelligence (AI).

This state of flux can be exploited for human-centred work design. This can be achieved by harnessing the potential of AI for better quality, precision, and reliability, thus not taking the work away from humans, but rather bringing individual skills to bear even more effectively. Humans and AI together stand for high-performance companies and improved working and living conditions.

With innovative methods at the interface between AI development and AI use and validation on practical pilot applications in the healthcare industry and industrial SMEs, we show ways to transform the working world. New forms of work organisation help create the conditions for forward-looking technology to become reliable by consistently involving people and thus developing its potential. These are the prerequisites for economic efficiency and acceptance.

Bochum Economic Development is involved in the project as a partner.