ESA launches a new “Space for Health” website
If you are an organisation or health institute working on health applications, you are often deluged by large amounts of information, but have difficulty homing in on what you need. This is also true for the all-important theme of health-related activities at ESA, which, by its very nature requires the support of diverse sources across the Agency’s wide range of space assets in general.
The new European Space Agency’s Integrated Applications Promotion (IAP) initiative announces the launch of a new central portal embracing ESA’s health-related activities across all directorates of the Agency, and spanning all types of work and projects included within this wide theme: “Space for Health”.
This will be particularly useful for business enterprises and institutions since it provides an overview of health-related applications, covering recently completed and on-going projects.
As Didier Schmitt, Integrated Applications Health Expert of ESA’s Inter-Directorate Task Force, succinctly explained: “The daily health-related projects and challenges encountered by the health industry and health providers can usually only be solved by an integrated approach, where the expertise and assets of very diverse bodies must be brought together.”
The editor of the website, James Kass, a member of the Telemedicine Alliance, said that he is constantly receiving queries from stakeholders in the health industry, health institutions, government and international organizations, who are seeking for information, expertise and collaboration from the Agency: He said “I realized that a central point of information would better serve the Agency’s stakeholders and European industry, and now, for the first time, it is a simple matter to view the entire scale of ESA’s health-related activities at a glance, in context, and to know where to go to find more information.”
Any user can now search at one portal for a particular domain of health applications and see in the blink of an eye what kind of health-related activities and projects are or have been carried out by the Agency. The interested parties can also easily see which of the Agency’s diverse assets can be used for health applications, such as: Earth observation, Satellite communications, Satellite positioning and navigation, Human spaceflight, Technology R&D, Operations and infrastructures. Additionally, the user will find information of funding and partnership programmes.
There are many organisations which have already shown interest in working with the Agency to develop dual-purpose technologies and applications, i.e. having space and terrestrial synergies.
For further enquiries, you are invited to contact the following IAP email: health@esa.int, and for more information, please go directly to the website: www.esa.int/health
