SOLID4HEALTH

Status: Finished Data & AI Health

SOLID4HEALTH s a Flemish project that unlocks personal health and lifestyle data using secure, ethical Solid building blocks. This know-how is shared through workshops and education to developers, healthcare providers, and students to drive innovative preventive health applications.

Take a look at the platform in these videos (in Dutch)

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

To guide developers in practical adoption, SOLID4HEALTH delivered an online Ethical-Legal Compass for Care Technology (in Dutch) to evaluate data-driven health solutions. In addition, extensive technology cookbooks were developed that outline optimal procedures for encryption, consent management, authentication and compliance with eHealth standards.

Four use cases, 10 workshops

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

Throughout the project, ten interactive workshops disseminated Solid expertise to technology providers, healthcare organisations and service vendors, while approximately 800 students across six bachelor programmes were 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 forged links with existing eHealth platforms in Flanders, ensured GDPR-aligned governance and laid out clear pathways for market valorisation through incubators and innovation clusters.

All tools and materials remain publicly accessible on SOLID4HEALTH | Thomas More to ensure sustainability. By accelerating Solid-based innovation in preventive healthcare while upholding individual rights, SOLID4HEALTH aimed to establish a scalable model for future health-data ecosystems.

VITO’s role in SOLID4HEALTH

VITO served as the innovation engine behind SOLID4HEALTH, leveraging its proven expertise in ethical-legal frameworks, decentralised data platforms and interoperability to turn Solid-based prevention from concept into practice.

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), it led the technical build of the four use-case demonstrators. Key innovations included 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 rigour, standards compliance and hands-on POCs, VITO guaranteed that SOLID4HEALTH not only demonstrated LinkedData potential to Flemish enterprises and care organisations but also set a sustainable blueprint for future preventive-care ecosystems.