Universitaet Muenster

The project’s objective is to develop and evaluate healthcare software products and algorithms that improve the streamlining of patient flows and capacities in the program area, ensuring access to and efficiency of healthcare. We focus on emergency services, hospitals, and care facilities and their collaboration across the border. Due to the geographical proximity in the border region, the duplication of, e.g., ambulances and (intensive care) beds is not absolutely necessary. Rather, the joint use of capacities across the border offers the opportunity to provide patients with the care they need and to reduce overcapacity. This is a complex planning task that requires a substantial amount of coordination. We support this planning task. We use methods from the fields of IT, artificial intelligence, and analytics to ultimately manage patient flows between healthcare facilities and capacities within the region intelligently using software and algorithms. The algorithms enable data-driven decisions based on demand forecasts. Besides regular demand, we also consider peak demand, e.g., pandemics, as cross-border collaboration is even more important due to the high demand. We develop the software based on feedback from our partners in the healthcare sector in order to remove barriers for practical implementation. We simplify the use of the products through a new training concept. The cross-border perspective on patient flows and capacities offers great potential to improve efficiency, quality, and health outcomes in the program area. The cross-border consortium comprises companies, universities, and partners from the healthcare sector and combines the necessary expertise to address requirements from Germany and the Netherland.

Geospatial technology innovations for land tenure security in East Africa
In most Western countries land rights are recorded in a land registry. Property has a verifiable owner and a mapped boundary. Usually this kind of information forms the basis for taxation as a form of income for national governments. However, in a lot of countries this is not so obvious and land tenure is not maintained. This causes a lot of disputes, land grabbing, slum formation and miss-use of land resources. The goal of its4land is to develop tools to make the mapping of land rights faster, cheaper, easier and more responsible. They are inspired by the continuum of land rights, fit-for-purpose land administration, and cadastral intelligence. Ultimately this must lead to an end-user oriented land administration system. Therefore, emergent geospatial and Earth observations technologies, including smart sketch maps, Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), automated feature extraction, and Geocloud services are used.
The overriding philosophy of this project is that it transcends single disciplines, country approaches or national boundaries. In this project development means co-designing, adapting, integrating, demonstrating and validating. The project seeks to enable tool combinations that are both end-user and market responsive.
The its4land project is carried out by eight consortium partners from Europe and East Africa combining academia and private sector. African partners are Ethiopia (Bahir Dar University), Kenya (Technical University of Kenya) and Rwanda (INES Ruhengeri; ESRI Rwanda). European partners are the Netherlands (ITC), Germany (University of Muenster; Hansa Luftbild) and  Belgium (KU Leuven).