Healthy Ship 4 U (HS4U) is an EU funded project under the Horizon Europe programme, dedicated to contributing for a healthier future in shipping. It involves a multidisciplinary consortium of 22 partners from 8 different countries. The project aims to develop and demonstrate holistic ship design solutions that will facilitate the early detection, prevention, and mitigation of general health conditions, pandemic crises and communicable disease outbreaks in large passenger and cruise ships by ensuring healthy ship operations and safe return to port during a health emergency.
The initial phase of HS4U, from September to February 2023, was successfully completed and played a vital role in raising public awareness on the project’s goals/assets (social media platforms creation, website, promotional material…) and in the elaboration of HS4U’s relevant scientific outputs (sensors and actuators scenarios) to be published for the benefit of academic, research and industrial target audiences. Overall, these months contributed to set up the foundations of the HS4U project, unlocking a comprehensive understanding of the specific features of the shipping industry, stakeholder needs and dynamics, and the relevant key channels and tools to disseminate and communicate on HS4U.
Upon the knowledge acquired during the initial phase, HS4U entered its second phase, taking place from March to September 2023. Throughout this period, consortium partners deployed a wide range of activities to engage further with relevant stakeholders including external events (European Council for Maritime Applied R&D (ECMAR) annual Technology Day and brokerage event) and through the publication of scientific papers (Reducing Uncertainty and Increasing Confidence Unsupervised Learning), thus creating knowledge impact and enabling other researchers to use the project’s results in their own work. In addition, brainstorming on the robot-cabin and the demo space Pilot cases took place among project partners to discuss and plan accordingly their implementation. Discussions focused mainly on the data collection planning (evidence-based data, recordings) and on technical information on the cruise ship’s floor plans.
An important milestone was reached by HS4U recently with the establishment of a synergy with Healthy Sailing. Similarly to HS4U, the project aims to improve the quality of passenger shipping services, facilitate recovery from COVID-19 pandemic and make passenger shipping safer. This new collaboration led to joint dissemination actions including mutual project’s websites reference, exchange and publicising other news, reports and newsletters, support on social media, and the creation of 2 common joint working groups. More collaborations are expected to appear soon as contacts have been made with relevant Horizon Europe-funded projects.
At present, HS4U’s major next steps are the preparation of its 2nd General Assembly in the Netherlands (December 2023), drafting the Horizon Results Booster service, and last but not least, the 2nd Dissemination & Communication Joint Work Meeting with Healthy Sailing.
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