On 14 July 2026, an online workshop brought together living lab practitioners from across Europe and Canada to finalise policy recommendations on regulatory barriers and enablers in transitional care. Facilitated by Francesca Sperandio and Martina Desole of the European Network of Living Labs (ENoLL) alongside Despoina Petsani, the 90-minute session invited participants to ground abstract regulatory debates in concrete experience drawn from their own projects.
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The workshop marked the culmination of several months of work. The process began with a survey distributed to living labs working in healthcare, which identified the main regulatory barriers and enabling factors encountered in practice. A first workshop then explored the concept of regulatory learning and produced initial policy recommendation ideas, which were subsequently presented during the annual regulatory learning session with the Joint Research Centre. Where earlier activities addressed transitional care in general terms, this session took a deliberately targeted approach.
Discussion was structured around three use cases: hospital discharge management and monitoring; remote monitoring and home-based care optimisation; and inclusive technologies for ageing and chronic care. Participants worked through each in turn using a shared Miro board, identifying barriers before moving to ideal solutions and finally to concrete asks for policymakers. Facilitators stressed that the use cases were not mutually exclusive, but served to give the transitional care pathway a more precise focus.
Data emerged as the dominant theme across all three use cases — specifically, questions of responsibility, liability, consent and interoperability. Janette Hughes of the Digital Health and Care Innovation Centre in Scotland described how information governance routinely delays projects, noting that applications within NHS settings can take six months to clear. Her organisation has been testing an alternative in which the patient holds their own data and grants consent to share it directly, an approach that in one carers-focused living lab saw governance signed off within days. Teemu Santonen raised the burden of repeating full approval processes for minor procedural changes, proposing pre-verified templates instead. Àlex from Neà polis described waiting up to a year to have new devices validated in Catalonia, making fast-paced testing effectively impossible. Sara Ahmed pointed to parallel initiatives requiring duplicate data-sharing agreements, and to the persistent need to print records into patient charts for legal reasons.
A recurring proposal was the proportionality of regulation. Participants argued that requirements should reflect both technology readiness and service readiness — a text message in a discharge workflow carries different risk than continuous cardiac monitoring feeding a hospital dashboard. Several suggested living labs could act as regulatory sandboxes: trusted environments where technologies are validated at earlier stages and regulators engage with communities before rules are set. Hughes also called for dedicated innovation transfer budgets, arguing that evidence without a route into routine practice yields no impact.
ENoLL will now draft the policy recommendations from these inputs, with a validation workshop planned for September. Participants may continue contributing examples via the Miro board and the ENoLL healthcare working group. A related session will take place at Open Living Lab Days in Belgium.
