In the weeks before the official Kick-off of the Hackathon, excitement was mounting as registrants started to join the online dedicated workspace. From the start, the event promised to be very diverse and multidisciplinary. Participants with different backgrounds ranging from students, entrepreneurs, start-ups, coders, researchers, scientists, and Earth observation specialists shared their passion about space and the development of innovative applications.

Although the audience was not able to brainstorm and exchange their ideas face to face, and no Irish beers were shared at the end of the competition, the online event allowed for the digital participation of professionals that might not have been able to travel to Cork. Moreover, the virtual Hackathon attracted a very international audience, giving participants from across Europe the opportunity to be involved in the preservation of Irish heritage.

Four challenges were presented to the participants, who were asked to come up with innovative ideas based on the use of Copernicus and Galileo data to safeguard Irish cultural and natural heritage, to monitor the effects of costal changes on cultural heritage, and to respond to the threats of COVID-19 (a challenge that the European Commission fostered for all Copernicus Hackathons implemented during these difficult times).

The team with the best idea presented a solution for Heritage Surveillance and Monitoring using advanced remote sensing techniques to detect ground deformation and to monitor subsidence at archaeological sites, monuments and historic urban centres, and relying on algorithms to detect different types of surface changes caused by erosion, floods, vegetation or human actions. Their presentation, together with the presentations of all teams that were awarded a prize is available here.

The Office of Public Works (OPW) of the Republic of Ireland, consulted by Eurisy prior to the Hackathon, proposed the challenge on monitoring the effects of costal changes on cultural heritage. The OPW also offered part of the prize awarded to the team with the best idea on this topic. The OPW showed its commitment and interest in finding a suitable solution for this critical issue by taking the time, before and during the hackathon, to mentor participants on how climate change threatens cultural sites and popular tourist destinations along the Irish coastline, with negative impacts on the economy of local communities.

To give an example, in 2019 the heavy storms hitting the West coast of Ireland caused the Dunbeg Fort in Dingle, a promontory fort built in the Iron Age, to partially collapse. The team with the best idea on this topic presented a solution called MAYA (Monitoring Coastal Erosion Anywhere), relying on Sentinel-2 data to study the effects of coastal erosion on sites situated around the Irish coast, using Dunbeg Fort as a case study.

In the end, a total of nine teams pitched their projects online to the jury and the other participants. Apart from the team tackling the COVID-19 challenge, all other teams decided to address the challenges related to monitoring the effects of coastal changes and to safeguarding Irish cultural heritage. This underlines the potential for Copernicus to effectively contribute to preserve Cultural Heritage in Europe and around the world. It also indicates that cultural heritage matters to the young European professionals working with Earth Observation data.

Indeed, the effects of climate change and human activities on cultural heritage have been widely acknowledged. Yet, heritage managers have little cost-effective tools to efficiently monitor the threats to cultural heritage and to hence target their adaptation measures. The Hackathon has set an important wave of ideas and projects in motion that could meet these pressing needs.

To find out more about the hackathon, please visit the event website. The recording of the Pitching and Awarding Day is also accessible here.

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After the opening session on the 24th of April, participants started teaming up. The next day, the Copernicus programme was introduced to the participants with a presentation followed by a workshop and technical mentorship. The teams worked remotely on their projects during the next couple of days. For this week, the particpants are free to join a daily webinar. On Tuesday 28 April, Weronika Borejko from EARSC presented Project PARSEC-H2020, and a Eurisy presentation on the topic of smart cities is planned for today. Starting from next week, on Monday 4th of May, the teams will be reviewed by their mentors. On Friday 8th of May, during the last day of the hackathon, the teams will present their results and the jury will select the winners.

Eurisy Secretary-General, Jean-Jacques Tortora, will be part of the jury evaluating the participating teams. On April 24, during the event kick-off, Jean-Jacques Tortora was invited to give an opening speech. If you missed the opening remarks by the organisers and official guests, you can watch all the introductory remarks below.

I would like to congratulate the organisers, not only for having proven to be so flexible in coming up with this new organisation online, but also for having a renewed focus on the challenges posed by the coronavirus, which is a historical challenge posed to all societies around the world and definitely Copernicus has a role to play in our response to this crisis.

Jean-Jacques Tortora emphasised the wide range of opportunities offered by space data and concluded:

Copernicus is a source of vast social economic benefits. One of the key factors to that is the free and open data policy which enables and encourages private actors and start-ups to create innovative services and applications. It is quite clear that global challenges require global solutions. This is what space is good at, and to some extent, something that only space can do. Pandemic crises is one of them, but next to that we also have climate change and the Green Deal, as well as the digital agenda. Copernicus contributes to the modernisation of the public sector, delivering more efficient public services. I look forward to a successful, fruitful and constructive hackathon despite the difficult circumstances. I would like to really congratulate and encourage all the teams to come up with fresh and innovative ideas and I look forward to further discuss them with all of you.

Eurisy will continue to support the hackathon with a webinar on the topic of smart cities. The webinar, scheduled on 29 April between 15:30 and 16:00 (CET), will be freely available via livestream.

For the full programme see: https://hackathon.rst-tto.com/programme/en.

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So far, the adoption of telemedicine has been pretty limited to specific cases and for basic consultations. The current necessity to respect social distancing, together with the overall limitation of the movements in the cities, have lately provided momentum to a rapid and global development of telemedicine.

The vast majority of the governments are now turning to telemedicine as an outstanding solution to provide general consultations avoiding patients to move from their places and potentially get exposed to a risk of contamination but also as a decisive support tool to identified home quarantined COVID-positive patients with mild symptoms.

Although telemedicine exists since quite some years now, it is not yet regarded as an official medical act. In most cases, the adoption of telemedicine has been slowed down by the lack of national regulatory frameworks, IT infrastructures and trained doctors. At the same time, patients were also reluctant or deterred by such technological solutions, in particular because of the major changes it implies on the doctor-patient relationship.

The rapid spread of the SARS-Cov-2 coronavirus and its high degree of contagion are leading governments to reconsider their approach to remote and connected health options. The health systems are today brought to their limits: hospitals, are facing important shortages of medical equipment (from ventilators to masks, gloves and hydro-alcoholic solutions), overcrowded ER and ICUs, and finally a shortage of healthcare professionals, who are among the most exposed to the virus. Digital solutions can definitely help mitigating the risks of contamination and favouring the flattening of the transmission curve.

Under these circumstances, accelerating the adoption of telemedicine at legal and regulatory levels is becoming a compelling need.

Telemedicine around the world

All around the world, there are various approaches to telemedicine. In developing countries, as well as in regions short of medical aid, the use of telehealth proved its effectiveness in the care of populations in remote and rural areas. In the Asia-Pacific region, the telemedicine market is expanding and it is expected to further develop in the future, given the on-going growth of the aging population and the spread of chronic diseases such as diabetes.

In the United States, 82% of the population does not use telemedicine services due to a lack of adequate infrastructure and reimbursement schemes. The situation in Europe is quite similar. Across the region, most of the policy makers are hesitant to include telemedicine in their reimbursement schemes, in particular for privacy related concerns. The most advanced countries with regarding telemedicine services around Europe are UK, Norway, Denmark, Sweden, the Netherlands and France. The others have not yet elaborated national policies in this matter.

However, with the outbreak of the COVID-19, many barriers seem likely to be overcome. Indeed, the United States and China have actively promoted the uptake of telemedicine solutions to tackle the emergency by lifting previous restrictions. In India, the government is looking for remote solutions to avoid the overwhelming of hospitals, limit the movements around the country and cover the majority of the population.

Remarkable is the recent evolution of telemedicine in France, where the practice is considered a legal medical act only since 2018 and therefore subject to reimbursement by the national Social Security. Before COVID-19 outbreak, the digital services were barely used, except in few cases. But, over the last few weeks, the number of accesses to these services skyrocketed: between the 1st and the 28th of March, 601 000 consultations have been conducted across the country. Such dramatic growth has also been fueled by the decision made by the Assurance Maladie, the French Health Insurance, to increase the reimbursement of the practice from 70% to 100%.

Ireland is also implementing its national approach, thanks to the support of Enterprise Ireland, the start-up WELLOLA launched an app and a portal for teleconsultation to respond to the current health emergency, and to favour the interactions between doctors and patients. Such an example is raising interest of other European countries, as for Italy where the vice minister of Health, Pierpaolo Sileri, recently presented to the government an amendment to boost telemedicine practice in the country.

What about space-based technologies and health in this moment?

As pointed out in our previous posts (What we can learn from the corona crisis with satellite data, and Call for space assets in response to COVID-19) the space sector is actively trying to respond to the emergency by inviting start-ups and SMEs to propose solutions to tackle the COVID-19, with a specific focus on telemedicine and e-education. Indeed, space-based technologies can be adopted to enhance the control of infectious diseases such as COVID-19. Especially satellite navigation and communication can be exploited on a large scale to help containment strategies and to assess the treatment of the patients while protecting the medical staff. Also, Earth observation satellites have been put to work during multiple health crises. In 2014, the Copernicus Emergency Management Service (EMS-rapid mapping) was activated during the Ebola epidemic crisis. The Italian Ministry of Interior and the Civil Protection recently asked for the activation of the EMS service during the month of March 2020 and beyond. The main driver for activation was the urgency of mapping stable and temporary health facilities, such as triage, and so on.

Moreover, the SES satellite-based eHealth communication platform, SATMED, is now available free of charge for the healthcare professionals’ community to fight the pandemic. The Government of Luxembourg, that owns the platform, is giving free access to the eHealth applications available, offering also cloud storage capabilities in compliance with data protection and regulations.

The European Space Agency also deployed Tempus Pro devices in response to COVID-19. These lightweight all-in-one monitors are normally used by doctors at ESA’s European Astronaut Centre (EAC) to assess and communicate the condition of astronauts when they return to Earth.

What’s next?

In Europe, apart from specific cases where telemedicine has been successfully adopted, in general terms, it can be rightfully affirmed that the lack of supporting policies, awareness, and training are limiting the revamp of the health sector. Even if EC adopted a series of measures and initiatives to respond to the vacuity of the legal schemes in the field, still at the national level the legal and policy bottlenecks are burdening the implementation of new solutions and impeding the scale-up of telemedicine providers’ solutions.

However, in the very near future things might radically change. The novel coronavirus confronts Europe with the need to re-invent and re-organise the health sector. In 2018, the European Commission estimated that by 2021 the global telemedicine market would reach €37 billion value, with an annual growth rate of 14%. After the emergency, these numbers are poised to evolve. Indeed, the business of telemedicine might face a much stronger acceleration that should encourage the governments to better take advantage of this practice for more efficient national health policies.

The space sector has a role to play in this process. The technical and budgetary involvement of the European Space Agency and national space agencies can favour the integration of space technology within the health sector. Additional support could be granted to users by providing training and education to professionals in the field. Institutional space actors and service providers should interact more with users and with governments to support and contribute to the decision-making process.

In conclusion, this crisis may lead to a reorientation of the health sector and to eventually speed-up the adoption of telemedicine practice. In this sense, the exploitation of telemedicine should not be considered as a by-product but a mainstream solution.

The post The strengthening of the health sector after the COVID-19 outbreak appeared first on Eurisy.

European Space Agency (ESA)

While ESA isn’t really placed to help forecast the progression of the virus, it is responsible for developing and operating the family of Copernicus Sentinel satellites on behalf of the European Union, ensuring the flow of data for the Copernicus-enabled services. These sophisticated satellites, as well as new artificial intelligence technologies, can be used to understand and monitor some of the societal shifts happening right now.

To see how Earth-observing missions could be further used to explore the effects of COVID-19, ESA has issued two new initiatives. The aim is to see how satellite data can be used, for example, to map changes around transport networks, commercial ports and heavy industry such as oil refineries, to understand the effects that COVID-19 is imposing on society, the economy and the environment.

• Space in response to Covid-19 outbreak

In cooperation with the Italian Minister for Technological Innovation and Digitalization (MID), ESA launched an Announcement of Opportunity to respond to the emergency that Europe, and especially Italy, is facing because of the spread of the coronavirus. Companies are invited to propose Demonstration Projects dedicated to the deployment and demonstration of pre-operational services, addressing healthcare or education. The scope is to support the realisation and deployment of digital solutions to help citizens and communities which are facing the extraordinary consequences of the COVID-19 outbreak. This call closes on 20 April 2020, 13h00 CET.

• Submit an innovative proposal for characterising COVID-19 impacts

This new call has been added to the Permanently Open Call, part of ESA’s Earth Observation Science for Society programme. Proposals which address the monitoring of Covid-19 impacts on society with Earth observation data will be considered. The closing date is 17 April 2020 at 13h00 CET.

European GNSS Agency (GSA)

• Precise location is a key requirement when attempting to monitor and map the spread of a disease and GNSS is one of themain tools supporting this. Galileo, currently embedded in over 1.3 billion smartphones and devices worldwide, is helping to increase GNSS accuracy and availability, especially in urban areas. Since the outbreak of the coronavirus earlier this year, many apps have been developed that use GNSS precise location to monitor the global spread of the virus and to map outbreaks of the COVID-19 disease. GNSS-apps are also proving their usefulness by helping people to implement social distancing in queues and other public spaces. The GSA is looking for apps that are already working and available in app stores. Submit details of your solutions in writing to market@gsa.europa.eu and they will be featured on www.useGalileo.eu/GNSS4Crisis. The goal is for this page to become a toolbox to help authorities, emergency response services, citizens and app developers to understand what resources are currently available and what needs remain unmet.
• It is also possible to develop new applications by submitting innovative ideas to solve pressing societal challenges with the help of satellite data. For Earth observation there is the Copernicus Masters, and for satellite navigation there is the Galileo Masters.

Copernicus Hackathon

• The Copernicus Hackathon Sofia 2020, organised by the Risk-Space Transfer Technology Transfer Office (RST-TTO), will be a virtual Hackathon between 24-26 April with the motto “Space Hacking of COVID19”. The Hackathon will cover topics such as the monitoring of air pollution, assessment of water quality, assessment of geographical distribution during this pandemic. Topics can also be suggested by participants.

• Eurisy, the National Space Centre and the Blackrock Castle Observatory of the Cork Institute of Technology organise the Copernicus Hackathon Cork online on 9-13 June 2020 on the issue of “Natural and Cultural Heritage”. A special challenge is dedicated to the impacts of Covid-19. The hackathon will challenge students and IT professionals to use the data made available by the Copernicus Earth Observation System to better protect, manage and promote natural and cultural heritage. A webinar will be held on May 18th.

COVID-19 Custom Script Contest

The European Space Agency, in coordination with the European Commission, is launching a special edition of the Custom Script Contest, focused on the support of space assets during the COVID-19 crisis, managed by Euro Data Cube group. It is a quest for ideas and new algorithms on how satellite data could help monitor and mitigate the situation for the upcoming months, as the world will get back to business and will need to adapt from this crisis. The contest will be running until end of May with weekly prizes. Due to importance of the matter, the best ideas will be selected on a continuous basis and will be presented to the European Commission in the context of the dossier ESA is preparing on space as a support to Covid-19 situation.

NASA International Space Apps Challenge

Join the special edition of the International Space Apps Challenge on May 30-31 and tackle the COVID19 challenge in this global virtual hackathon!

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Geographic Information Systems (GIS)

The geospatial community fulfils an important role in tracking the spread of the COVID-19 virus by constantly updating the number of affected people, and providing real-time data with GIS-driven spatial health information. In order to visualise and track the location and number of confirmed COVID-19 cases, deaths, and recoveries for all affected countries, there is a list of several interactive web-based dashboards. The dashboards rely on data from online platforms, social media, news services, and communications from regional, national and local health authorities, such as the Centre for Disease Prevention and Control in China, Europe and the United States. For more detailed information about the global outbreak, this Worldometer can be consulted.

Most of the information data is generated locally, but once coupled with satellite imagery it makes an outstanding tool for situation awareness. For example, Maxar developed multi-layered Human Landscape data that is essential for disease modelling. The layers include medical facilities, demographic details, tourist attractions, cultural points of interest, roads, public transport hubs, and water infrastructure. By combining satellite imagery with thousands of open data sources, it creates a rich dataset of both geospatial and demographic data. This enables public administrations to see what is happening where and who is involved or impacted, in order to anticipate civilian needs, to enforce restrictive measures, to ensure safety in public spaces, and to better manage critical infrastructure in the times of crisis we are living.

Remote Sensing

Copernicus data showed how the coronavirus outbreak in China and Italy has prompted pollution to plummet, as nitrogen dioxide emissions have declined following nationwide quarantine measures. Never before have we measured a reduction in air pollution on such a size and in such a short period. The extreme improvement of air quality is, of course, the result of exceptional circumstances. However, it does show that the impact of human activities on the environment is huge. The Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service (CAMS) combines satellite and ground-based observations to monitor air quality in Europe. This gives indications about human activities during the lockdown, as well as the effects of air quality (including pollens) on respiratory health.

Over China, the Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service (CAMS) observed a major drop in emissions during February as factories were closed and streets were cleared.

Over Italy, Copernicus satellites have also shown a sharp decrease in emissions during the first months of 2020.

These data, showing the immediate impact of the reduction of traffic and other activities, definitely carry lessons that need to be considered once the crisis has been overcome. One can only hope that humanity will not be immune to rethink how people are moving around and how they are using fuels. This does not just apply to China or Italy, but also to the rest of Europe and other regions in the world.

Traffic may have been reduced drastically due to the strong measures taken by national governments, however, many European citizens are unable to travel back home, and trucks carrying medicine and essential goods are blocked. In order to get citizens, and medical facilities around Europe, everything they need, Copernicus images are also being used to monitor road activity and traffic congestion at borders between member states. Furthermore, the Copernicus Emergency Management Service has been activated in Italy to map critical temporary health facilities, field hospitals and gathering areas in order to have a clear understanding of the current situation of the territory during the emergency. The Copernicus Climate Change Service further demonstrates the versatility of Copernicus data with an application that maps mortalities against temperature and humidity data.

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