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Europe has been facing key challenges in the health and social support fields due to the demographic changes, caused by population ageing and its impact on the rising provision of care.

The innovation in Active and Assisted Living (AAL) has the potential do attend to these social and health needs, benefiting simultaneously the economic opportunities generated by Silver Economy.

The visual computing advances provided the video cameras the ability to “see”, improving their functionalities to become “intelligent cameras”.

However the monitoring through cameras could be seen as intrusive, and infringing privacy rights, mainly due to the concern that the non processed video could be watched by non-authorized viewers or stored for inappropriate usage. The approval of these technologies is also low due to the Orwellian surveillance feel, “Big Brother” style.

Based on these assumptions, the project visuAAL started in September 2020, in which Cáritas Coimbra is partner.

The project visuAAL will last for 4years (2020-2024), funded through the Research and Innovation Marie Skłodowska-Curie (MSCA) program of the Horizon2020 program from the European Union.

It holds 5 partners and 14 partner institutions from Austria, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Portugal, Spain, Sweden and the United Kingdom. visuAAL will provide a combination of trans-disciplinar and intersectorial training, non-academic internships, courses and workshops on the scientific and complementary abilities to 15 researchers in high performance Early Internships (Early Stage Researchers -ESRs).

During the project, Cáritas will welcome intern researchers from other countries (secondment). Besides, the Director of the Innovation Department at Cáritas Coimbra, Carina Dantas, is part of the project’s Supervisory Board and will be one of the instructors in the campaigns focused on the user’s acceptance of the new technologies.

visuAAL – Privacy-Aware and Acceptable Video-Based Technologies and Services for Active and Assisted Living, aims at fulfilling the knowledge gap that exists between the user’s needs, and the safe and proper usage of the video based technologies, to provide effective care and support for older citizens that manage their health and well-being.

visuAAL seeks to increase the awareness and comprehension on the ethical, legal, privacy and social specific questions to each context, necessary to implement the visual system in hospitals, homes and communal places, in a way that protects and reassures the users. The results will stimulate the development of a new research perspective to approach the video based solutions and privacy focused on assisted living, in a constructive way.