By Prof. Petros Patias and Dr Vasiliki Fragkoulidou
When people think about rehabilitation research, satellites are probably not the first thing that come to mind. The PREPARE-REHAB team, however, likes to think beyond the obvious.
Last April, in Paphos, surrounded by discussions on geoinformation, environmental monitoring, and spatial technologies, the project joined researchers from around the world to explore this idea: what if understanding health also means understanding the environments people navigate every single day?
At the 12th International Conference on Remote Sensing and Geoinformation of the Environment (RSCy2026), organised by the Eratosthenes Centre of Excellence under the auspices of the Cyprus EU Council Presidency, PREPARE researchers from AUTH and KIKLO presented their work on: “Integrating Copernicus Environmental and other Socioeconomic Data into the OMOP Common Data Model for Spatiotemporal Analysis of Hypertension and Comorbidities.”
It may sound highly technical, but the idea behind it is not. The idea behind it is very much human.
Health does not exist in a vacuum. It is connected to where people live, the environments around them, access to resources, daily living conditions, and the social realities that shape everyday life. To explore these connections, the PREPARE-REHAB team is working with tools from the OHDSI community to bring together different layers of information.
This includes environmental data from the Copernicus Programme, the European Union’s Earth observation programme, alongside regional socioeconomic indicators and standardised health data. In practice, this allows researchers to study conditions such as hypertension through more than medical records alone, bringing environmental and geographic contexts into the picture.
The work builds on ongoing efforts from the OHDSI GIS Workgroup, which is expanding the OMOP Common Data Model with geospatial structures capable of supporting spatiotemporal analysis. By connecting health information to time and place, researchers can investigate patterns and relationships that are often invisible when datasets remain separated. And all of this is being pursued with privacy-preserving approaches at the centre of the process.
There was something almost unexpected about discussing healthcare research in a space filled with conversations about satellites, mapping technologies, and environmental observation. But RSCy2026 turned out to be the perfect place for exactly that. Researchers from different fields came together to explore how technology can help us better understand the world around us, from environmental change to broader societal challenges. PREPARE-REHAB added another perspective to those discussions by asking an equally important question: how can these same tools help us better understand human health?
The answer? Well… might just be written in the stars.
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Posted by: Nayara Güércio (Trilateral Research)