Multi-Million grant awarded to ELSA Lab AI for fair healthcare
The Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO) has awarded €2.3 million to a new research initiative focused on Artificial Intelligence (AI) in healthcare.
The grant goes to the ELSA Lab AI for Fair Healthcare, a national consortium investigating how AI can be developed in a fair and inclusive way, with particular attention to underrepresented groups in healthcare. Psychologist Hans Marien from Utrecht University plays a central role in the ELSA Lab, coordinating the Open Living Lab AI for Health Equity.
AI has the potential to improve healthcare, but there is also a risk that existing inequalities could be exacerbated. AI systems trained on limited datasets for diverse populations may perform less effectively. The ELSA Lab identifies these issues and develops solutions for an inclusive digital healthcare infrastructure. This approach takes into account existing regulations, such as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), and establishes guidelines to make AI fairer. Transparency in AI development is a key aspect, ensuring databases are representative and AI technologies are accessible and understandable to healthcare providers and patients.
Working on AI Solutions
Within the ELSA Lab, Marien coordinates the Open Living Lab AI for Health Equity. In this Living Lab, AI solutions for healthcare are developed in collaboration with patient groups, advocacy organisations, and developers, ensuring that the solutions are not only legally and ethically sound but also practically applicable and socially just.
Illiteracy
Marien also explores how AI can be applied in an ethical and inclusive way in healthcare, with a particular focus on illiteracy and language development disorders. He is the founder of the ELSA Lab AI Approach to Low-Literacy, where AI technologies are developed to meet the needs of people struggling with complex texts or digital communication.
€1.2 million
The Utrecht-based researcher is naturally pleased with the grant. “Although the University of Amsterdam is the lead partner in the ELSA Lab, I am leading the Open Living Lab from Utrecht University, which has been awarded a €1.2 million work package. This will allow us, for example, to collaborate with ITSLanguage to develop an automated phonetic analysis tool to diagnose language development disorders in children. At the same time, we can test a multilingual AI tool for detecting illiteracy among the parents of those children in the Goallab.”
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