News

Cáritas Coimbra participated as a speaker in the International Workshop “End-Users Open service platforms active and healthy ageing”.The workshop focussed on the needs of end-users from open service platforms that promote active and healthy ageing. The online event took place on March 10.

The main objectives of this workshop were to inform potential end-users (older adults, people living with a disease or chronic condition), home care service providers, regional health and policymakers and insurance companies about open service platforms and their potential use. This way, the project can identify the requests and needs of the various stakeholders and share success factors and lessons learned among the various participants of the workshop. Later on, these outcomes can be implemented in the development of open service platforms.

Caritas Coimbra mentioned present and past projects and focussed its talk on those involving use cases and results of interaction with open platforms.

Here are some of the main outcomes shared at the workshop:

• The focus on user-centred care allows for personalized service;
• The provision of new sensors and devices allows the collection and sharing of a large amount of data between user and caregiver;
• With open service platforms it is possible to have multiple applications that cover different sectors or domains and that are easily interoperable without the need to purchase different applications and devices and/or from different suppliers;
• An open service platform with applications from different suppliers that responds to the requirements can be much more economically competitive;
• Most of the time, when the projects are finished, the platforms cease to have funding and, in turn, their development and updates also cease to exist.

The workshop was held as part of the PlatformUptake.eu project. This project is a Coordination and Support Action, funded by the Horizon 2020 programme of the European Union. PlatformUptake.eu aims to analyse and describe the ecosystem of these platforms, promoting synergies between the respective networks and related projects in the AHA – Active and Healthy Ageing domain and IoT – Internet of Things. It is a partnership of 12 entities: Caritas Coimbra (Portugal), Italian National Research Council (Italy), Fraunhofer (Germany), Technical University of Madrid (Spain), Institute of Communication and Computer Systems (Greece), Jožef Stefan Institute ( Slovenia), AFEdemy (Netherlands), Linköping University (Sweden), University of the Balearic Islands (Spain), Stichting Smart Homes (Netherlands), Etablissements A. Lievens Lanckman (Belgium) and the Project’s coordinator, SYNYO GmbH (Austria).

More information about the project is available at https://caritascoimbra.pt/project/platformuptake-eu/