FRANKFURT UNIVERSITY OF APPLIED SCIENCES

Their core work

Frankfurt University of Applied Sciences is a practice-oriented higher education institution (Fachhochschule) that conducts applied research at the intersection of information and communication technology and human-centered social challenges. In H2020, their work spanned robotic assistance for elderly personal care and digital crowdsourcing platforms for emergency child rescue — both projects that translate ICT capabilities into measurable social impact. As an applied sciences university, they are positioned closer to the deployment end of the research spectrum, making them a pragmatic partner for innovation actions that need to bridge prototype and real-world use. Their relatively small EC funding footprint suggests targeted, specialist contributions to larger consortia rather than project leadership.

What they specialise in

How they've shifted over time

Frankfurt UAS entered H2020 through health technology, specifically ICT-enabled assistive robotics for personal care (I-SUPPORT, 2015–2018). Their second project shifted the application domain entirely toward digital social platforms and citizen-powered emergency response (ChildRescue, 2018–2020), while retaining the common thread of using ICT to solve human-centered, socially impactful problems. This signals a broadening from hardware-adjacent health tech toward software-platform-driven social applications, though the dataset is too small to determine whether this is a deliberate strategic shift or opportunistic participation.

Their trajectory suggests growing interest in digital platform design for social and safety applications, moving beyond healthcare hardware toward citizen-facing ICT systems — a profile relevant for future projects in digital public services, safety tech, or social innovation.

How they like to work

Frankfurt UAS has participated exclusively as a consortium partner across both H2020 projects, never taking a coordinator role. Despite only two projects, they engaged with 20 unique partners across 9 countries, indicating involvement in medium-to-large multi-national consortia. No partner overlap between the two projects suggests they bring flexible networking rather than a fixed inner circle, which makes them adaptable but less predictable as a long-term consortium anchor.

With 20 unique consortium partners across 9 countries from just 2 projects, Frankfurt UAS participates in well-networked, pan-European consortia averaging 10 partners per project. Their geographic spread covers a broad slice of the EU research map, with no evident concentration in a single country cluster.

What sets them apart

As a Fachhochschule — Germany's applied sciences university model — Frankfurt UAS occupies a distinct niche between pure research universities and industrial R&D labs, making them well-suited for innovation actions that require both academic rigor and deployment-readiness. Their combination of robotics/health-tech and digital platform experience is uncommon and valuable for consortia tackling complex sociotechnical problems (e.g., ageing populations, missing persons, digital public safety). Consortia seeking a German HES partner with applied ICT credentials in human-centered domains will find few direct equivalents at this size and cost level.

Highlights from their portfolio

• I-SUPPORT
  The largest-funded project in their portfolio (EUR 238,521) and one of the few EU-funded initiatives to apply robotic systems specifically to personal hygiene assistance for elderly people — an unusually intimate and technically demanding application domain.
• ChildRescue
  A rare example of a collective awareness platform applied to law enforcement and child safety, combining crowdsourcing, mobile technology, and emergency coordination in a high-stakes humanitarian context.