On May 11th and 12th 2023 the Cancer Survivorship – AI for Well-being cluster meet in Madrid to discuss the on-going activities and prepare for the forthcoming months.
CLARIFY is part of this initiative, born in 2020, that brings together 11 EU-funded projects working in Artificial Intelligence (AI) for healthcare and in the well-being primarily in post-cancer treatment space with a collective aim to cross-fertilize and transcend individual project experiences for the wider good and outcome of their individual projects.
The Cluster has so far organized multiple activities including the ‘Meeting of Minds’ (MoM) workshops, which transformed from a once-off meeting to bring patient groups and doctors together into a series of events focusing on knowledge and practices exchange between the members, but also including active engagement from end-users and stakeholders. The cluster uses the MoM events as a chance to showcase its results and to listen to the relevant parties and stakeholders (e.g., patients and survivors, policymakers) to obtain feedback on the methodology, concepts, and practices that CS_AIW members are implementing through their solutions.
More recently the Cluster has also issued a #CS_AIW White Paper, (https://www.h2020-faith.eu/resource/the-cs_aiw-white-paper/) which was officially launched on May 11th at the Madrid meeting. The White Paper reports not only on the clusters’ achievements and lessons learned from their collaboration, but also on recommendations. They include:
- Strong focus should be placed on participatory research.
- Expectation management is very important. End users should be aware of the expected technology readiness level.
- Time and effort required to monitor data and optimize workflows must not be underestimated.
- Highly desirable to adapt to real-world technologies in use by target sectors.
- Open-source tools that adhere to standards for data annotation and interoperability should be prioritized.
- Crucial to work intensively in pre-production settings before transferring to hospital systems.
- Attention is usually not paid with enough attention on data standardization, pre-processing, curation and integration, making sure the necessary expertise and resources are allocated within the project.
The White Paper highlights the multiple relevant aspects of the cluster, explained in an accessible language including the benefits and challenges of collaboration, the technical barriers to development and adoption, user acceptance, and scientific, legal and ethical aspects. Thus, it can be of great benefit for policymakers, international and national funding agencies, researchers, healthcare workers, patient representative organizations, individual EU citizens, and in general an audience interested in the exchange of ideas and a participatory research vision in AI for Well-being.
