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UdZ 2-2021 / 55 quality jobs in regions. This is also the case in the structurally weak region of Aachen, which is the focus of the GALA project, where around one in six employees currently work in the “inpatient and outpatient care” submarket alone, and which has to cope with a particularly large economic structural change as a result of the decision to phase out lignite in the “Rhenish mining area” at the beginning of 2019. In the Aachen region alone, 23,000 employees in the lignite industry, its supplier industries and other related economic sectors are directly and indirectly affected by this coal phase-out. Aachen Health Region at a Glance With 46 cities and municipalities and a population of more than 1.3 million people, the Aachen region is currently one of six recognized health regions in North Rhine-Westphalia and has an innovative strength that is well above the national and state average. In coping with structural change, the Aachen region is concentrating on its specific strengths and potential in the sense of ‘smart specialization’ 3 on the basis of the guiding principles of ‘identifying strengths, bundling activities and exploiting opportunities’. Innovative companies are increasingly integrated into regional structural policy. The health economy was identified in the economic study of the Aachen region from 2020 4 as one of six lead markets in the region, along with the information and communications industry, education and research, production technology and materials, mobility as well as logistics and energy, water and waste management. Specifically, this lead market includes inpatient and outpatient care, insurance and administration, manufacturing of pharmaceutical and medical (technical) products, and trade. With approximately 82,000 employees in 2019, the healthcare and life science sector is the leadmarket with the highest number of employees in the Aachen region. This means that almost one in five workers is employed in this sector. The lead market accounts for 18.7 percent of the employees in the Aachen region and for 14.0 percent of the number of companies. The share of turnover of the lead market in the economy of the Aachen region, however, is relatively low at 5.3 percent. Due to demographic change and the associated changes, it can be assumed that the healthcare industry in the Aachen region will continue to grow. The extraordinary density of companies and research institutions in the Aachen region are the drivers here. As part of the RWTH Aachen Campus project, for example, research isbeingconducted intheB iomedicalEngineering Cluster onclinicalandexperimentalimaging,image-guidedtherapy, intelligent implants, personal healthcare, biohybrid systems and pharmaceutical product development. Closely associated with the cluster are the Institute for Applied Medical Technology at RWTH Aachen University , the Helmholtz Institute for Biomedical 3 Arndt et al. 2020 4 Arndt et al. 2020 Engineering and the Philips GmbH Chair for Medical Information Technology (MedIT) there. The Institute for Neuroscience and Medicine at the Jülich Research Center completes the lead market-related research landscape. Driving forward networking between clinics, medical and medical technology producers, and the broad-based science and research institutions is the task of the regional industry association MedLife e. V ., which supports the joint project ‘GALA’ as an associated partner. Overall, it is therefore clear that the Aachen healthcare region is characterizedbyahighnumberofknowledge-intensivecompanies as well as research institutions and produces particularly high innovationpotential. 4 GALA Guiding Themes Specifically, the ‘GALA’ project focuses on the four guiding themes of human-machine interaction , healthy working , digital collaboration , and agility and innovation , which are explained in more detail below: Human-Machine Interaction: it determines the way in which people and machines communicate, cooperate and/or collaborate directly with each other, but also the interaction and collaboration between people independent of location and time. An interface determines how humans transmit their instructions to the machine and in what form the machine executes these instructions and outputs the results. Depending on the information inputs and outputs, the information transmission in human-machine systems differs and so does the interaction. For example, machines typically output information via visual, auditory, and/or haptic displays that a human picks up via sensory modalities. The recorded information is processed in the next step with the aim of making a decision. In the wake of digitalization and automation, the development of human-machine interaction is an important component in the healthcare industry. Personal assistance systems that communicate with humans via speech and, for example, help on the Internet in the search for therapy suggestions or the explanation of clinical pictures are already being developed. The recording of human gestures and the subsequent interpretation are also being researched and tested in science. Healthy working: Healthy working is of central importance for a growing number of employees in the healthcare industry. Only if they are able to perform their work effectively while learning to reduce