PREPARE REHAB

Millions of people in Europe that are recovering from illness, injury, or surgery need rehabilitation. However, current approaches often follow a one-size-fits-all model, which doesn’t suit the individual needs of each patient. Rehabilitation depends on many things, such as health history, social background, and personal experience. Because of this complexity, it’s often difficult for healthcare professionals to offer truly personalised care.

To solve this, PREPARE brings together doctors, researchers, and tech experts to create smarter tools. These tools use artificial intelligence to combine medical data with insights about behaviour and lifestyle. Therefore, they help guide treatment choices that match each patient.

The project will test its approach in Italy, the Netherlands, Greece, and Slovenia. It will focus on nine major conditions, including Parkinson’s disease, spinal problems, and joint replacements. This way, PREPARE will show how smart, personalised rehabilitation can work in real life.

Trilateral Research helps make sure PREPARE stays ethical, fair, and legal. We play a key role in protecting people’s rights and guiding the responsible use of AI in healthcare.

Here’s how we support the project:

• We carry out regular checks on ethics, privacy, and fairness in how AI tools are used.
• We look for bias in how patients are grouped and suggest changes to improve fairness.
• We give advice on policies that support safe and trustworthy AI in rehabilitation.

In addition, we lead the project’s outreach. We make sure that healthcare staff, decision-makers, and the public hear about the project’s results. We will also organise a final event to share the lessons learned and encourage future use of the tools.

PREPARE is set to improve rehabilitation in ways that benefit patients, clinicians, and health systems. By using AI and real-world data, it will lead to better decisions and better care.

The project will create impact on four main levels:

• Scientific Impact – PREPARE will boost research by offering new tools that show how people recover and which treatments work best.
• Technological Impact – It will build easy-to-use tools – data driven prediction models, that help doctors choose the right care, quickly and clearly.
• Healthcare & Societal Impact – PREPARE will help reduce treatment inefficiencies, and improve quality of life for patients.
• Policy & Regulation – It will offer policy recommendations to  integrate AI into rehabilitation medicine.

Because it focuses on real needs, PREPARE can shape the future of rehabilitation—making care more personal, fair, and effective.

Publication: Can We Explain AI?: Explainable AI in the Health Domain as Told Through Three European Commission-funded Projects 

Blog: Understanding Bias and Fairness in AI Systems

Project website: https://prepare-rehab.eu/

Project dates: 1 June 2023 – 31 May 2027 

Funded by the European Union. UK participants in Horizon Europe Project PREPARE are supported by UKRI grant number 10086219 (Trilateral Research). Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or European Health and Digital Executive Agency (HADEA) or UKRI. Neither the European Union nor the granting authority nor UKRI can be held responsible for them. Grant Agreement 101080288 PREPARE HORIZON-HLTH-2022-TOOL-12-01.