Unveiling four new groundbreaking stories revealing ITEA's continuous impact

Marking an incredible 25-year journey since its inception, ITEA stands as the catalyst behind over 300 RD&I projects. This collective effort has harnessed more than 35,000 person-years, a remarkable €3.7 billion in combined public and private investments, and many innovations that have shaped industries and lives.

Some examples of these life-changing innovations are gathered in the ITEA Impact stream: https://itea4.org/impact-stream.html. This year, this online living publication extends its collection to 40 stories! Among these, here are four newly added stories showcasing extraordinary impacts:

PARTNER Impact story

During a patient’s journey through the health system, his or her medical information is often stored in multiple databases focusing on specific elements of the needed care and the patient’s condition – even within one hospital. These databases generally cannot interact, which makes it impossible to draw up all information belonging to one patient. In addition, information coming from self-monitoring solutions can also be very valuable when integrated with hospital’s data. The PARTNER project has developed an architecture that makes it possible to let different systems, offered by multiple vendors, communicate with each other.

PARTNER demonstrates that a patient-centric approach with an optimised collaborative care team leads to greater efficiency – up to a 10% improvement compared to traditional workflows – and a knock-on effect of lower healthcare costs.

VMAP Impact story

A wide range of computer-aided engineering (CAE) software tools already enables virtual material and product design, virtual manufacturing and machining process parameterisation, and virtual product testing of high-tech materials. However, these tools are rarely interoperable and contain multiple native formats for storing the CAE data to be transferred between simulation code. The VMAP project has created the world’s first CAE workflow interface standard for integrating multidisciplinary and multi-software simulation processes in the manufacturing industry and its major result is simple: setting up and adapting workflows in computer-aided engineering is now quicker, easier and more cost-effective than ever before.

STARLIT Impact story

The global incidence rate of cancer is expected to grow by 70% over the next two decades, with Radiation Therapy treatment currently recommended for 52% of new patients. Although radiation oncology has caused a drop in mortality for several cancers, the need remains to reduce side effects. The solution lies in ‘first-time-right’ treatment in which the right dose is given to the tumour while keeping the dose to healthy tissue as low as possible. STARLIT - a follow-up to the award-winning ITEA project SoRTS - developed technology to improve treatment accuracy and minimise the unintended dose in image-guided radiation therapy.

As a result of the STARLIT project, the number of radiotherapy treatments needed for cancer patients will be reduced and so too will the related burden. A cancer patient can also benefit from a risk reduction of side effects as less tissue is damaged. This improves overall safety of the treatment and reduces recovery time.

TESTOMAT Project Impact story

In software development, reliability and agility often seem like opposing forces. This issue is aggravated by the increasing complexity of software and the constant drive towards faster release cycles for maximum market impact. The goal of ITEA’s TESTOMAT Project was to allow software teams to increase development speed without sacrificing quality. To achieve this goal, the project advanced the state of the art in test automation for software teams, moving towards a more agile and automated development process.

The TESTOMAT Project's great strength is its customised nature, which guarantees promising results regardless of the level of automation already found within a company. For those using fully manual testing, an average improvement of 60-80% can be gained in their time to market. For already-automated companies, 15-30% fewer faults are predicted thanks to the TESTOMAT Project. These achievements, resulting in fewer bugs in software, are fundamentally important as nowadays people totally rely on and trust, for example, the use of software tools in healthcare, scientific experiments and many more domains.

These stories illustrate the impact of ITEA's projects on diverse industries. We invite you to discover the full stories to witness the transformative power of innovation: https://itea4.org/impact-stream.html.