Prof. Stephen Agyefi-Mensah, an Associate Professor of construction and design management in the Department of Construction Technology and Management, School of Built and Natural Environment, Cape Coast Technical University (CCTU), leading a distinguished team of researchers, has won the Best Paper Award at the Smart Healthy Environments (SHE) World Conference 2026, organised this year in Antwerp, Belgium.

The Conference, which provides an annual forum for academic researchers, healthcare practitioners, care providers, and industry ecosystem stakeholders on “empathetic design” and innovation, focused on engineering care infrastructure that dynamically adapts to human needs, enhances inclusivity, and elevates community wellbeing.

The award-winning paper titled "Living Labs as Open Innovation Ecosystems for Smart Healthy Environments: Lessons from the Global North and Agenda for Research in Ghana" addressed the conference sub-theme, "Innovation Ecosystems: Governance, policy, and collaborative transitions in smart health."  

By evaluating successful Living Labs globally, the paper highlighted the critical Global North–South distribution imbalance, and set the stage for the Ghana Living Lab Initiative (GLLI), focusing on how Living Lab innovation could be used to reengineer Ghana’s Community-based Health Planning and Services (CHPS) compounds system for enhanced healthcare delivery.

Special mention is made of Mr. Emmanuel Kekeli Akuaku, an Instructor at the Department of Civil Engineering, CCTU, a co-author of the paper.

The global event was organised by a coalition of elite European bodies, including the Dutch Empathetic Environment Living Lab (DEEL), the Accelerating the Home Care Innovation Ecosystem (ACE) project (backed by the European Union’s Interreg North Sea Region programme), Eindhoven University of Technology (TU/e), Netherlands and the HAN University of Applied Sciences, Netherlands.

This international achievement establishes CCTU as a forward-thinking leader in global research for smart, sustainable built environments tailored to modern healthcare delivery.

Source: Directorate of Public Affairs, CCTU