Cyber-Physical Intensive Care Medical System for Covid-19 (ICU4Covid)

The European health services have well responded to the Covid-19 emerging crisis, especially if and where the intensive care unit (ICU) capacities were sufficient, were prepared and collectively cooperating, sharing knowledge and were able to protect from further spreading of the disease among the healthcare workforce and the patients. Today, only 47% of hospitals have the recommended coverage of intensive care specialists and they are unevenly distributed between centres and periphery.

The Cyber-Physical System for Telemedicine and Intensive Care (CPS4TIC) enables existing or new ICU structures to transform and operate as one ICU Hub with one central ICU and connected ICUs in peripheral hospitals. CPS4TIC was used successfully in the first wave of Covid-19 to ensure efficient and effective diagnosis and treatment of Covid-19 patients, while reducing the risk of infection drastically.

The CPS4TIC consists of a telemedicine cockpit, telemedicine consoles at each peripheral hospital, a connector platform and smart bedside hubs including robotic arm at the bedsides of both, the central telemonitoring clinics and the peripheral telemonitored hospitals. The ICU hub operates telemedicine, continuous real-time telemonitoring and bedside smart care environment. The bedside smart care environment reduces the risk of infection for the health workforce significantly both for the central and the peripheral hospitals. ICU4Covid will deploy and test the CPS4TIC at large-scale, in 4+4 ICU Hubs in Europe (4 from initial consortium and 4 selected by an Open Call), involving more than 30000 patients/year with a coverage of approximately 60 Million citizens.