GMV, Plymouth Marine Laboratory, Istituto Zooprofilattico Sperimentale dell’Abruzzo e del Molise, GMATICS, Brockmann Consult, and a significant number of eminent scientists are developing EO4HEALTH, a project that will further develop the analytics and data sources used by decision-makers to extract actionable information for designing strategic plans in the field of public health.

This project, led by GMV in Portugal, is part of a cluster of ESA Future EO Resilience activities aimed at developing cutting-edge services for pandemic preparedness and risk mitigation, including innovative predictive tools based on Earth observation (EO).

By shifting efforts from science to engineering, EO4HEALTH aims to assess the suitability of EO imagery in the context of public health decision-making, scenario assessment, and impact/risk assessment, with a clear focus on prototyping and developing pre-operational analytic pipelines.

This objective will be realized through the establishment of a Resilience & Earth Observation Virtual Observatory involving key stakeholders, public authorities, and private actors in three areas of interest: ecosystems, cities, and health. This Virtual Observatory will act as a one-stop-shop for all project-related activities. It will not only collect relevant EO and health-related data (e.g. epidemiological data) for use by health experts, but will also enable two use cases and the integration of additional processing capabilities for the study of patterns associated with emerging diseases.

The use cases now being implemented are based on the extensive knowledge gained from previous ESA-funded activities. These have focused on the ability of EO data and artificial intelligence (AI) methods to automatically identify patterns that can accurately predict the spatial-temporal re-emergence and spread of two types of disease: West Nile disease and cholera.

All this technical and scientific work is being done in close collaboration with relevant health stakeholders, such as the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC), and the World Organisation for Animal Health (WOAH), who are helping to tailor the project development to their actual operational needs.

As prime contractor, GMV is not only involved in all project-related matters but is also leading the integration of advanced data analytics to support health-related developments.