vCare final event: a lighthouse project ends with positive evidence for the use of virtual coaching solutions

After five years of project work, the final event of our vCare project finally took place on August 29. It was another opportunity for all project partners to present the project's positive results. We were able to review the challenges we had mastered together.

Admittedly, the achieved final clinical results vary a bit depending on the pathology and sub-score of the indicator assessment. But in sum, the recovery of an active and independent life at home in terms of Quality of Life has been reached in terms of the measured improvements during the pilot phase by ensuring continuity of care and the access to personalized cognitive (for the neurological cases), motor exercises (for all patient groups) and overall coaching advises by the VC. Also for the risk factor reduction we could observe positive results. This comprises a considerable increase of daily number of steps, time devoted to exercises or number of accesses to the elearning section of the Avatar app. The adherence to the home care and rehabilitation plan presented to the patients in terms of accesses to the platform, interaction with the vCare solution or the total number of times patients performed an activity suggested by the vCare solution were in line with the expectations. However, the effort required for technical adjustments and the associated target group of elderly patients as well as a somewhat reduced affinity for technology may have been underestimated to some extent. Similarly, there are positive indications regarding the feasibility of the foreseen personalisation and health promotion. Partial (automated) refinements of the rehabilitation therapy were possible. Still, the avatar was able to make adaptations to the pathways in some cases. The acceptance of the virtual coaching measures by usability scales was good to very good for the majority of the patients.

The program of the vCare final conference was prosperous and very inclusive, creating room for many interactions and collaborations. The balance between content originating from vCare and other projects/products was, of course, very much instrumental in this respect and has allowed us to reach many exciting and promising conclusions. vCare has thus reached its objective, which was to capture the interest of an interested public, and we believe vCare will reach much more people thanks to the proceedings. Furthermore, this event was an essential contributor to the indirect exploitation strategy of vCare.

Many personal contacts were created during this event, and new collaboration ideas emerged. This was one of the very first times such a variety of projects could join forces together, and we received a lot of positive feedback.

In one of our panel discussions and many talks afterward, we summarized that besides the enormous expertise we could share and learn from the present research projects that:

• All presented projects share similar/ same issues, open questions, and future research needs in the technological and social domains.
• What remains to be open is a shared source for future projects to learn from the past ones and prevent producing „more of the same“.
• What seems to be missing is a written think tank document as a valuable source for future EU eHealth projects and a must-read before the proposal phase.

The participants thus see the potential to not only set up an additional workshop but to build a knowledge base in the eHealth domain that is relevant to future funded EC projects and can also be transferred to international projects for intercultural comparisons and collaborations.

We can thus report a considerable interest from the partners on-site and online that feedbacked after the panel discussion. However, as the project has ended, we will need to find some resources in terms of financial support, time, and moderation.

Some more details can be found on the project website: https://vcare-project.eu/vcare-final-open-event/