Acronym: IN LIFE
Project Title: INdependent LIving support Functions for the Elderly
Duration: 36 months (01/02/2015 – 31/01/2018)
Description: The number of elderly living with cognitive impairment is growing rapidly due to increasing life expectancy. The percentage of those who live alone depends upon the condition (i.e. roughly 30% of those diagnosed with dementia) but the majority would like to live in their own home or with family, provided that it is safe, comfortable, and cost effective. IN LIFE aimed to prolong and support independent living for elderly with cognitive impairments, through interoperable, open, personalised and seamless ICT services that support home activities, communication, health maintenance, travel, mobility and socialization, with novel, scalable and viable business models, based on feedback from large-scale, multi-country pilots. Building on existing knowledge and tested AAL technology/services IN LIFE offered 19 different services, which wiere further optimised and adapted to the particular needs and wants of various elderly groups, including mild cognitive impairment (MCI), early dementia and cognitive impairment with co morbid conditions, plus formal and informal caregivers. These interoperable services were integrated into an open, cloud- based, reference architecture tested in 6 Europe-wide pilots in Greece, Netherlands, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, and UK, with over 1200 elderly with cognitive impairments, 600 formal and informal caregivers, and 60 other stakeholders. Attention was paid to issues concerning multilingual and multicultural environments. The project established and extensively tested new business models for a new taxonomy of elderly with cognitive impairments, encompassing those that are clustered as “dependent”, “at risk”, “assisted” or “active” and formulating and accessing new business scenarios, such as the “user-centric”, “service provider-centric” and “data exploitation-centric” ones. This work was carried out in 36 months by 20 partners from 9 European countries.
Objectives: IN LIFE main objectives were to:
- connect a wide range of adaptable ICT solutions for elderly with various cognitive impairments, into a common open reference architecture, to allow their interconnection and enhance their interoperability.
- instantiate applications, services and business models to different geographical and sociocultural backgrounds, user group types (i.e., early dementia, moderate dementia, etc.), as well as lifestyles (i.e., living at home alone or with spouse, living at elderly home, traveling, etc.).
- provide tools and systems for services adaptation and personalization, to meet the different needs and wants of each individual in a dynamic way, allowing services to evolve together with the users’ health and condition.
- provide tools and instruction to carers of people with cognitive impairments and/or dementia in order to support communication and functioning in daily life.
- estimate the return of investment of the different business models and connected services through pilots in 6 sites Europewide (North: UK, Sweden; Central: The Netherlands; South: Spain, Greece; East: Slovenia) and highlight best practices for relevant viable business and financial models for their uptake and instantiation per region and market.
- issue key guidelines on the proper and ethical application of the proposed business models, to guarantee the respect of users’ wants, lifestyle, personal data and personal beliefs.
- study the scalability and sensitivity of the tested business models and cases and provide guidelines on their optimal application in different financial, sociocultural and healthcare contexts.
HIT key role and responsibilities: In IN LIFE, CERTH/HIT had the following responsibilities:
- Technical and Innovation Manager
- Led the work on the user and stakeholder clustering, identifying their needs and wants and defining use cases
- Led a pilot to investigate the effect of cognitive deterioration in driving ability and experience of older drivers with and without MCI.
- Lead the work on risk assessment on technical, behavioural, operational and project level.
- Created a web application for fitness to drive assessment for medical health professionals.
- Led the work on HMI adaptability and personalization and the development of the central Decision Support System
- Led the work on the extension of existing standards and developing a framework for design guidelines and principles of drive state monitoring and assessment systems.
- Led the work for integrating the travel support modules into a mobile application.
- Led the development of evaluation framework, plans and of the respective tools and instruments.
- Led the estimations of the QALYs and performed the Quality of Life (QoL) impact assessment for all pilot sites and for the consolidated results.
- Developed, applied, and evaluated the training curricula, material and programmes for all types of IN LIFE services.
- Created the INLIFE website, the dissemination material (leaflets, posters, newsletters, etc.) and the project video.
Contact person:
Dr. Maria Panou
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+30 2111 069 550
Dr. Evangelos Bekiaris
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+30 2310 498 453 & +30 211 1069 599