Press releases
Robots on the ward in San Giovanni Rotondo: in FLDL Exprivia presents a research project with "Casa Sollievo della Sofferenza"

Taking place at the ‘Forum Mediterraneo della Sanità’ (Mediterranean Health Forum) is a workshop promoted by Exprivia | Italtel, entirely dedicated to smart technologies for the digital transformation of health care. Among the topics dealt with are not just robotics, but also artificial intelligence, radiomics and the key role of 5G networks that enable new health care services.

Health and social interaction: these are the goals underlying the 'Si-Robotics' research project initiated by Exprivia with various partners including the Istituto di Ricovero e Cura a Carattere Scientifico (IRCCS) Casa Sollievo della Sofferenza, which expects to develop robotic devices for hospital, home and residential care.

The project, carried out in collaboration with research institutions, universities, hospitals and institutional partners, will be presented tomorrow by Exprivia during the ‘Forum Mediterraneo in Sanità’, in Fiera del Levante in Bari. The occasion is a workshop promoted by the ICT group and completely dedicated to digital technologies that are revolutionizing health care - robotics, artificial intelligence, radiomics, blockchain - and to the new ultra broadband and 5G networks, which will make it possible to have telemedicine services ranging from remote monitoring of patients through wearable sensors to more futuristic uses such as remote telesurgery, thanks to the new frontiers of Tactile Internet.

'Si-Robotics' expects not only to support patients and health care professionals in health and medical assistance services through ad hoc robotic technologies, but also to contribute to improving the quality of life of the elderly, disabled people and fragile subjects in relational aspects to society.

“With Si-Robotics - comments Enrico Annese, Director of Business Development Healthcare and Public Sector of the Exprivia | Italtel group, as well as coordinator of the workshop - we are talking about ‘social health care and social assistance’, in which the integration between robotic devices, IoT sensors and artificial intelligence techniques allow us to customize as much as possible the support of health care, medical assistance and rehabilitation, even in a domestic environment”.

The solutions will also be able to help assess the progress of the patients' physical and cognitive decline (frailty, dementia, mild cognitive impairment). The set of IoT devices, social robots and objects connected to the Cloud will collaborate to create a sort of "cognitive agent" to anticipate the user's needs and provide assistance, monitoring and coaching. The ‘Sì-Robotics’ project - one of seven financed in Italy for Exprivia - has been funded by MIUR with PON - National Research and Innovation Operational Program 2014-2020, for the 'Technologies for living environments' area, and is another piece of the commitment made by the Exprivia | Italtel group in innovation applied to digital health and to ongoing projects on 5G, the platform with the speed, security and low latency characteristics necessary to support new technologies.

"5G, Blockchain, Artificial Intelligence and Cyber Security are the crucial technologies that will change the health care of the future," says Stefano Pileri, CEO of Italtel. "In the context of 5G Exprivia | Italtel is working together with Cisco and has built a '5G framework' to use the features of this network, in terms of latency, slicing, pervasive coverage of the service, to enable mission-critical applications, such as health care. We take advantage of our experience in system integration and our ability to develop micro-services on the network layers to define together a '5G core' architecture that can also be applied to health care”.

The transformation of infrastructures and the new technologies will allow Healthcare to give the right answers to the aging of the population and to the growth of the needs of assistance connected to chronic pathologies, by adopting an innovative model that improves accessibility and rationalizes costs with the help of digital technologies.