Black Pearl Award goes to INSENSION project

2024-01-24

Black Pearl Award goes to INSENSION project
The Black Pearl Award is presented by EURORDIS-Rare Diseases Europe. This year’s award in the Medical Technologies category was awarded to the INSENSION project, implemented by the Poznan Supercomputing and Networking Center. The award recognises innovative, research-based work supporting people with profound and/or multiple learning disabilities.

The INSENSION project – Personalised ICT platform for people with PIMD was crried out by an interdisciplinary team of researchers from Poland, Germany, Spain and Slovenia, with the Poznan Supercomputing and Networking Center as the leader of the international academic and industrial consortium. Specialised ICT research and development work was carried out together with PSNC by the Information and Communication Technology Centre Foundation CTIC and the Jožef Stefan Institute. The ICT specialists were supported by Europe’s leading research team in this field from the Heidelberg University of Education and practitioners from the Na Tak Association with expertise in special education and the characteristics of profound complex intellectual disabilities. The commercialisation potential of the technology developed in the project has been evaluated by Harpo sp. z o.o.

The prototype of the developed system is designed to recognise the so-called non-symbolic behaviour of people with profound complex intellectual disabilities, interpret it as an intention to maintain or change the situation in the user’s environment and, if necessary, take the necessary action. The system gives people with profound complex intellectual disabilities gain the ability to communicate their needs to carers via short text messages, turn on their favourite music or control devices in their smart room.

The aforementioned Black Pearl Award is awarded by a European association of more than 1,000 organisations working with patients with rare diseases.