EIC Horizon Prize for ‘Early Warning for Epidemics’

Vector-borne diseases cause more than one million deaths globally per year. Thus, Horizon 2020 programme launches this call in order to find innovative solutions based on the large amount of data obtained from the Earth observation domain. Thereby, these solutions shall help to improve the ‘preparedness’ and response related to vector-borne disease outbreaks.

The challenge is to develop a scalable, reliable and cost-effective early warning system prototype to forecast and monitor vector-borne diseases in order to contribute to the prevention of outbreaks mitigating their impact on local, regional and global scales and providing support to existing elimination efforts.

According to the World Health Organisation (WHO), vector-borne diseases such as malaria, Zika, dengue or yellow fever cause more than 1 million deaths globally each year.

The Earth Observation domain is changing with increasing amounts of data being generated from space-borne, air-borne, in-situ and citizen observatories. Effective management of big data in this domain shall be an essential element in improving the ‘early warning’ capabilities of any system which aims to mitigate epidemics related to vector-borne diseases. The full potential of combining all the available data is not yet harnessed and innovative solutions are needed to enable the system’s wider use and exploitation in this context. Such solutions would not only help to improve the ‘preparedness’ and response related to vector-borne disease outbreaks.

Conditions and requirements

The specific rules of the contest are published in the H2020 Participant Portal by the European Commission, which will directly launch and manage the contest and award the prize based on the judgement of independent experts.

The prize will be awarded, after closure of the contest, to the contestant(s) who, in the opinion of the jury, demonstrates a solution that best meets the following cumulative criteria: