SOLID4HEALTH

Status: Ongoing Data & AI Health

SOLID4HEALTH is a Flemish project that unlocks personal health and lifestyle data using secure, ethical Solid building blocks—an online decision tree and technology cookbook—and shares this know-how through workshops and education to developers, healthcare providers, and students to drive innovative preventive health applications.

SOLID4HEALTH, a VLAIO-TETRA–funded regional initiative running from November 1, 2023, to October 31, 2025, is coordinated by Thomas More University of Applied Sciences and focused on Flanders. It responds to the growing societal need for ethical, preventive healthcare solutions by unlocking personal health and lifestyle data to fuel the creation, validation and valorisation of innovative digital health applications. At its core is Solid, a decentralised framework that returns data control to individuals via personal data pods.

To guide developers in practical adoption, SOLID4HEALTH will deliver an online decision tree to evaluate the legal and ethical prerequisites of any data-driven health app, alongside a comprehensive “Technology Cookbook”, which outlines best practices for encryption, consent management, authentication and compliance with eHealth standards.

Four use cases, 10 workshops

To demonstrate these tools, and in close collaboration with our steering group, we defined four use cases – mental well-being, nutrition, alcohol-prevention, and a first-to-second-line exchange focusing on obesity and physical activity – within which we built demonstrators consisting of both wireframes and technical proofs-of-concept.

Over the course of the project, ten interactive workshops will disseminate Solid expertise to technology providers, healthcare organizations and service vendors, while approximately 800 students across six bachelor programmes will be introduced to preventive-health data applications and the ethical-legal frameworks for platform-based data sharing.

A scalable model

Building on past pilots such as the European Solid4DigitalHealth initiative and other VLAIO TETRA projects, SOLID4HEALTH forges links with existing eHealth platforms in Flanders, ensures GDPR-aligned governance and lays out clear pathways for market valorisation via incubators and innovation clusters.

A broad awareness campaign will highlight the benefits of patient-centric data control, and all tools and materials will remain publicly accessible post-project to guarantee sustainability. By accelerating Solid-based innovation in preventive healthcare while upholding individual rights, SOLID4HEALTH seeks to establish a scalable model for future health-data ecosystems.

VITO's role in SOLID4HEALTH

VITO serves as the innovation engine behind SOLID4HEALTH, leveraging our proven expertise in ethical-legal frameworks, decentralised data platforms and interoperability to turn Solid-based prevention from concept into practice. In our dedicated work packages, we developed an 8CTP decision-support tool and a GDPR-compliance module that help organisations navigate ELSA requirements during design and development, and we mapped out how Solid pods interact with legacy health systems.

Drawing on prior and ongoing work in We Are (Solid pods, consent management and PIMS) and WellData (demonstrator for data-sharing platform and testing in field labs), we led the technical build of the four use-case demonstrators. Key innovations include translating the Flemish Health Guide (GGDM) into Solid-compatible data models, linking Vitalink via a Solid proof-of-concept, and developing orchestration mechanisms to enable seamless, runtime data sharing and reuse across multiple applications.

By marrying ethical rigor, standards compliance and hands-on POCs, VITO guarantees that SOLID4HEALTH not only demonstrates Solid’s potential to Flemish enterprises and care organisations but also sets a sustainable blueprint for future preventive-care ecosystems.