NEODATA+: Building Europe’s Multimodal Neonatal Data Foundation for Predictive Care

NEODATA+ is a Joint Interregional Project proposal for the UNITE JIP Call, initiated from an already operational high-frequency data infrastructure in a university Neonatal Intensive Care Unit. The project’s ambition is to evolve this proven clinical system into a robust, ethically governed, and interregionally scalable multimodal health data platform for Europe’s most vulnerable patients.

The platform integrates continuous physiological signals and full-resolution waveforms with multi-organ NIRS, synchronised video, and audio data. By combining these modalities, NEODATA+ enables objective assessment of pain, discomfort, stress, and early neurodevelopmental risk in non-verbal newborns. Video analysis focuses on movement patterns and spontaneous general movements, while audio analysis includes cry detection and characterisation as markers of neurological integrity and distress.

Unlike exploratory data initiatives, NEODATA+ starts from a mature, routine-care deployment. This allows the consortium to focus on consolidation, governance, interoperability, and advanced analytics rather than technical feasibility. Privacy-by-design, GDPR compliance, and alignment with the European Health Data Space are embedded from the outset, including clear separation between primary clinical use and regulated secondary use for research and innovation.

The project directly addresses both UNITE Call 1 challenges: advancing personalised, human-centric care through earlier and more precise recognition of neonatal needs, and delivering a concrete EHDS-aligned blueprint for harmonising highly sensitive hospital data across regions. The outcome is a transferable foundation for federated analytics, predictive modelling, and future AI development in neonatal and paediatric care.

We are actively seeking partners from UNITE regions to complete a strong interregional consortium. In particular, we welcome NICUs and paediatric care providers as end users, research groups with expertise in neonatology, neurodevelopment, ethics or data science, and solution providers experienced in digital health platforms, AI, interoperability, or secure data infrastructures. Partners will co-shape a clinically relevant, regulatorily defensible, and scalable European reference project that moves neonatal care from observation to prediction.

If you are interested in shaping Europe’s next-generation neonatal data infrastructure and translating real bedside data into better lifelong outcomes, we invite you to connect and explore collaboration.