ELSI-Lab – HealthTech in Social Science (ELTIS) is a teaching and research project focused on participatory technology development in the e-health sector. The project is funded by the Stiftung Innovation in der Hochschullehre (Foundation for Innovation in Higher Education) through the Freiraum 2026 program.
The project aims to provide students with practical approaches to entrepreneurship, innovation, and participatory technology design. The central question is how social science expertise—particularly regarding ethical, legal, and social implications (ELSI)—can be integrated early and systematically into the development of digital health innovations.
To this end, an innovative teaching format is being developed and tested across multiple cohorts, in which students apply their theoretical knowledge to real-world projects with startups. At the same time, founders will be made aware of the importance of participatory methods and ELSI aspects. The project thus combines teaching, startup support, and applied research, contributing to greater visibility for social science perspectives in the health tech and entrepreneurship context.
Funded by:
Stiftung Innovation in der Hochschullehre
Duration:
April 2026 – March 2028
Project manager: Rebecca Klocke
During menopause, also known as perimenopause, many women experience a significant impairment in their well-being and performance. Vasomotor symptoms such as hot flashes, but also sleep disorders, mood swings, and concentration problems are just a few of the symptoms that can occur during this phase of life. Despite the far-reaching effects on everyday working life and personal quality of life, many of those affected feel that they do not receive sufficient information and medical support. The joint project “PETRA-AI – AI-supported, educational therapy support for perimenopause” is developing a multimodal app that aims to offer affected women personalized information and support. The project has two main objectives: 1) Firstly, it aims to strengthen women's health literacy around perimenopause, which will be achieved through educational elements and the systematic recording of their own symptoms using a chatbot. 2) Secondly, the data collected in the app will be anonymized – with the consent of the users – and prepared for scientific studies in order to close gaps in gender-specific research and improve medical care for women in the long term. The project is funded by the Federal Ministry of Research, Technology, and Space (BMFTR) for a period of three years. Under the leadership of the Fraunhofer Institute for Experimental Software Engineering (IESE), the Junior Professorship for Health and E-Health is working in collaboration with the digital health start-up FEMNA, the Social Research Center at the Technical University of Dortmund, and the Berlin Institute of Health at Charité.
Funded by:
Federal Ministry of Research, Technology and Space
Duration:
November 2025 - October 2028
In the project “SAKuDA - A language assistance system for culturally and linguistically diverse elderly care”, an AI-based app is being further developed to provide support in inpatient care, taking into account the cultural and linguistic requirements of people with a migration biography.
Comprehensive care documentation is an important tool for quality assurance and serves to control and verify all care measures. Care activities must be documented systematically, correctly in terms of content and subject matter, promptly and continuously. At the heart of the project is a software solution whose speech-to-text function enables both day-to-day documentation and structured information collection (SIS) in the context of anamnesis and action planning via speech. The aim is to reduce the time spent on writing down and organizing care activities.
The SAKuDA project builds on technological results from the BMBF project “dexter: A language assistance system as an interaction system for care and patients” (FKZ: 16SV8791, funding period: 01.09.2021 - 31.12.2023). The current project serves to further develop the app in cooperation with the target groups. Due to the increasing number of migrant nursing staff - especially in the Ruhr area - the language-based app is to be expanded so that it also represents added value for people who are not native speakers. The Junior Professorship for Health and E-Health will lead the consortium in cooperation with the developers of dexter GmbH and the practice partner, Stella Vitalis GmbH, in various participatory formats through a co-creation process with the target groups in order to record the requirements for the software itself as well as the structural modalities for implementation and to formatively evaluate the app in ongoing practical tests.
Funded by
Federal Ministry of Research, Technology and Space
Duration
May 2024 - April 2026
The aim of DIM.RUHR is to create a data competence center for the Ruhr innovation region that primarily supports researchers from the health sector in their work with health data.
The project pursues three main objectives in the field of health data competence. The teaching objective aims to develop teaching and learning modules that are accessible to various target groups in the healthcare sector, especially those working in outpatient care. These modules should help to improve the quality of data collection, storage, processing and use. The research objective involves encouraging young scientists to conduct more research in the field of data science. The focus is on questions of data donation, consent, ethics, quality and diversity. The establishment of an experimental space provides a platform for networking research, care and practice to explore data-generating systems and existing data sets. The networking objective aims to develop structures for research data management. This includes the development of a joint health data repository in cooperation with universities and the implementation of a workshop program for regional and supra-regional networking. Through these measures, the project contributes to strengthening skills in handling health data and promoting cooperation between different players in the healthcare sector.
Cooperation partners
Consortium leader: Sven Meister, University of Witten/Herdecke
Ruhr University Bochum
Hochschule für Gesundheit University of Applied Sciences for Health
Frauenhofer Institute for Software and Systems Engineering
Hochschule Niederrhein University of Applied Sciences
ZB MED Information Center for Life Sciences
Funded by
Federal Ministry of Research, Technology and Space
Duration
November 2023 - November 2026
The objective of the project "Healthy and fit studying at the FFH", which is being carried out at the Fliedner University of Applied Sciences in Düsseldorf, is to introduce a variety of behavioral and relationship preventive measures as part of the company health management for students. The overriding goal is to improve the health of students by the end of the project period (2025). The Ruhr University Bochum is responsible for the process evaluation. By means of questionnaires and interviews, interim results are used to determine whether the overarching objective or the sub-objectives have been achieved and where adjustments may need to be made.
Duration
2021 - 12/2026
The highly regulated healthcare industry poses special challenges for founders and digital health start-ups in order to successfully implement their ideas. The complex demands that the healthcare industry places on founders require industry-specific support structures along the entire start-up journey from the initial idea to the marketing of the product. In the project Digital Health Ecosystem NRW - Focus Start-ups 2025, a sustainable ecosystem with a focus on digital health start-ups has been established, which produces patient-oriented digital products and digitally supported innovative services. This works complementarily and in cooperation with the already existing diverse offers of start-up support and builds on four pillars:
The project is funded by the Ministry of Economic Affairs, Industry, Climate Protection and Energy of the State of North Rhine-Westphalia.
Duration
10.11.2022 - End 2025
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Last update: May 08, 2026
