Heart failure (HF) is one of the most complex chronic disorders with high prevalence, mainly due to the ageing population and better treatment of underlying diseases. Prevalence will continue to rise and is estimated to reach 3% of the population in Western countries by 2025. It is the most important cause of hospitalisation in subjects aged 65 years or more, resulting in high costs and major social impact. The current “one-size-fits-all” approach in the treatment of HF does not result in best outcome for all patients. These facts are an imminent threat to good quality management of patients with HF. An unorthodox approach from a new vision on care is required. We propose a novel predictive, preventive and personalised medicine approach where patients are truly leading their management, supported by an easily accessible online application that takes advantage of artificial intelligence. This strategy paper describes the needs in HF care, the needed paradigm shift and the elements that are required to achieve this shift. Through the inspiring collaboration of clinical and high-tech partners from North-West Europe combining state of the art HF care, artificial intelligence, serious gaming and patient coaching, a virtual doctor is being created. The results are expected to advance and personalise self-care, where standard care tasks are performed by the patients themselves, in principle without involvement of healthcare professionals, the latter being able to focus on complex conditions. This new vision on care will significantly reduce costs per patient while improving outcomes to enable long-term sustainability of top-level HF care.

Architecture, Design and Virtual Reality game creation companies are in great need of acquiring, re-using and re-purposing visual and textual data to recreate, renovate or produce a novel target space, building or element. This come in align with the abrupt increase, which is lately observed, in the use of immersive VR environments and the great technological advance that can be found in the acquisition and manipulation of digital models. V4Design is a new project that takes into account these needs and intends to build a complete and robust design solution that will help the targeted industries to improve their creation process.

Nowadays vast amounts of multimedia content is being produced, archived and digitised, resulting in great troves of data of interest. Examples include user-generated content, such as images, videos, text and audio posted by users on social media and wikis, or content provided through official publishers and distributors, such as digital libraries, organisations and online museums. This digital content can serve as a valuable source of inspiration to the creative industries, such as architecture and gaming, to produce new innovative assets or to enhance and (re-)use existing ones. However, in its current form, this content is difficult to be reused and repurposed due to the lack of appropriate solutions for its retrieval, analysis and integration into the design process. In this paper we present V4Design, a novel framework for the automatic content analysis, linking and seamless transformation of heterogeneous multimedia content to help architects and virtual reality game designers establish innovative value chains and end-user applications. By integrating and intelligently combining state-of-the-art technologies in computer vision, 3D generation, text analysis, generation and semantic integration and interlinking, V4Design provides architects and video game designers with innovative tools to draw inspiration from archive footage and documentaries, inspiring and eventually supporting the design process.

Virtual reality games demand the use of highly realistic 3D models to provide an immersive environment to the users. Therefor, modeling of real world structures is a common process within the industry. In recent years the photogrammetric tools have become available to aid in this process. However, obtaining high quality imagery is still an issue w.r.t. budget and time constraints. We present a simple, effective method for the reuse of existing video and photo material towards the generation of 3D models suitable for a virtual reality gaming environment. An abundance of existing content may be available in on-line repositories (YouTube, Flickr, Google images,..) and can be exploited. A complete video-to-VR pipeline is presented and a use-case of the Berlin Gendarmenmarkt square is tested, wherein the use of both commercial and open source software is evaluated. Our proposed method improves existing workflows used by VR game designers in both structural accuracy and creation time of real world objects.

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