NEODATA+ Funded: EU to Close Paediatric Innovation Gap.

It’s official: paediatric innovation for children limping and lags dangerously behind. Structurally, for years. With nurse shortages at 15 to 20%, the hands on the bed are desperately few. Healthcare for the most vulnerable members of our society is at risk of cracking. While the innovation gap remains a pernicious problem.

Who cares?

The big EU just nodded to us. It's a win. So here comes NEODATA+: the ground layer to solve the problem of innovation in neonatal and pediatric care. Chosen and funded after more than 1.000 organisations engaged with the UNITE JIP open call. With 19 proposals making it to the finish line – and NEODATA+ landing in the top 3.

How so?

A newborn in intensive care is a top data-rich patient in the hospital and the least served by modern data infrastructure. Continuous heart rate, breathing, oxygenation readings, NIRS, movement patterns, cry acoustics – the evidence of how that baby is doing flows constantly from bedside monitors. What has been missing is not the data. What's missing is the infrastructure to connect it, interpret it and act on it in time. NEODATA+ is a European consortium assembled specifically to build that infrastructure – selected and funded in the UNITE JIP open call.

The neglect is structural, not accidental

The digital health revolution has transformed monitoring, diagnostics and care pathways for adult patients across Europe. Neonatal and paediatric intensive care – and «paeds» in general – is a different story. Newborns and critically ill children represent a small clinical population compared to adults with cardiovascular disease, cancer or metabolic conditions. They are ethically complex to study and commercially difficult to serve. The result is decades of under-investment: clinicians in NICUs continue to work with fragmented data systems and limited decision-support tools, while their patients remain unable to communicate what they feel. The gap did not open by accident – it opened because the market had easier problems to solve.

What NEODATA+ actually builds

NEODATA+ addresses this head on. The project integrates physiological signals with video and audio data to build a harmonised, interoperable platform for neonatal intensive care across departments and across borders. By bringing together continuous waveforms, behavioural observation and clinical context, the consortium builds tools for clinicians to detect pain, stress and discomfort in real time – catching the breathing, heart and oxygen problems that, left undetected, carry long-term neurodevelopmental consequences. The platform is designed from the outset to comply with the emerging and stringent requirements of the European Health Data Space – so that what is built in one hospital can travel to the next, and the data it generates stays governed, secure and reusable for practice and research. And yes: we bundle departments into one to achieve the data power to run clinical AI.

From Stress and Pain to Apnea, Bradycardia and Desaturations Ai's

Each participating NICU makes available a minimal standardized multimodel dataset, at least at daily clinical operational frequency, and if possible high frequency and fully multimodal including NIRS, video and audio. We anchor or efforts on day to day clinical events that are common in each NICU: apnea's, bradycardia and desaturations. As upstream causal events we will identify pain, discomfort and stress. As downstream effects we look at neurological outcomes where possible. Equally important is the focus on solving legal and regulatory issues that hinder the bundling of must needed datapower. A large part of activities exactly to lessen the regulatory hurdles for this vulnerable group.

Selected from nineteen: what that number means

UNITE JIP’s open call drew more than 1.000 organisations and received 19 proposals from across Europe. Three were selected. NEODATA+ earned its place through a rigorous multi-stage evaluation that concluded the project is ready to deploy – not merely promising. The UNITE programme, launched under the European Commission’s Regional Innovation Valleys initiative with a total budget of €20 million, exists specifically to move digital health from local pilots to cross-border deployment. Being named alongside CARDIO-HUB and RAD-TRACK EU places neonatal intensive care data in the same category of urgent European health infrastructure as cardiovascular care and radiation safety. That positioning matters.

What Neolook brings to the consortium

Neolook brings clinical infrastructure already in deployment. As a Philips spin-out, Neolook has spent years building and validating the bedside Neolook S2S platform for neonatal and paediatric intensive care – certified under EU MDR, ISO 27001 and NEN 7510, quality-assured and running in university hospital NICUs in Europe already. The S2S Academic application, which underpins the NEODATA+ data acquisition and analysis layer, is not a prototype. It is an operational system that generates real clinical data in real critical care environments. At its base sits the award winning Neolook One smart sensorhead, watching and listening over each child 24/7 while capturing live datastreams. At its top runs the AI Switchboard, silent in shadow mode at the bedside, made for federated learning. NEODATA+ takes that operational foundation and asks the question that matters most: what if every NICU in Europe had access to this?

A window that will not stay open

The European Health Data Space is taking shape now. The decisions about which data types are included, which infrastructures are recognised and which clinical domains receive interoperability investment will be settled in the next three to five years. Neonatal intensive care will either be part of that architecture – or it will be deferred again, for another generation.

NEODATA+ is a deliberate act by Dutch, Italian and Romanian hospitals, research institutions and Dutch medtech company Neolook that decided the gap is too consequential to leave to market forces alone. «Uniting those who care» is how Neolook describes its purpose. In NEODATA+, we apply it at European scale to close the gap.

Want to know more? Reach out to Marco D'Agata, CEO and Founder of Neolook