News

Last week, Cáritas Coimbra met with its AGAPE project partners for the 7th face-to-face meeting of the consortium. The event took place on 1 and 2 October at Don Carlo Gnocchi Foundation (Florence – Italy).

Throughout the meeting, the most recent developments in the project were discussed and the next steps were planned. The consortium focussed essentially on the progress of technological platform, business models, and ethical considerations.

On the second day, each pilot site (Portugal, Italy and Romania) presented the results achieved so far. Cáritas Coimbra, represented by the project manager Maria Inês Santos, shared with the consortium the preliminary results of the Portuguese pilot, highlighting the participants’ progress in terms of innovation adoption. Cáritas Coimbra is the entity responsible for implementing the pilot in Portugal, having already tested the AGAPE ecosystem at Santo António dos Olivais Parish Council, São Pedro Social Centre, and São José Community Centre. It is currently testing this ecosystem at the Rainha Santa Isabel Centre (Day Care Centre).

At the end of the last meeting day, Maria Inês Santos led the workshop on the project’s ethical dialogue, with the support of her co-worker Elisabete Pitarma, also project manager at Cáritas Coimbra. This workshop followed on from work that has been carried out since project’s beginning, with the aim of achieving an ethical excellence. Achieving this excellence will mean that the AGAPE services and products are trusted, reliable, meet user goals and health needs of older adults, as are adopted by the market at scale. Cáritas Coimbra is leading the Ethics and Privacy Protection task in this project and so has been doing a deep and continuous work in this area. Throughout the execution of this task, it has received input from all the consortium partners, showing the relevance of this sharing in achieving ethical excellence.

The consortium is integrated by 8 European organisations, namely: Cáritas Coimbra (Portugal), Don Carlo Gnocchi Foundation (Italy), Umana Persone (Italy), SenLab (Slovenia), Luxembourg Institute of Science and Technology (Luxembourg), ‘Carol Davila’ University of Medicine and Pharmacy (Romania), Be-Com (Italy), Sensoria Europe (Netherlands), and Medea (Italy), the project’s coordinator.

The AGAPE project is co-funded by the European AAL Programme and, in the Portuguese case, by the Foundation for Science and Technology (Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia).