EDGE joined its thirty-five partners for the first meeting of the European SHAPES project, held on November 11th to 13th at the campus of the National University of Ireland Maynooth. This meeting signals the beginning of the project activities that aim to significantly improve the autonomy and independence capabilities of older individuals.
The three-day meeting enabled a lively discussion of the different perspectives congregating in the project to create an innovative concept of autonomy and independence for older individuals that combines digital solutions and socio-technical approaches to build an ecosystem supporting improved quality of life for older individuals experiencing the permanent or temporary reduction of their capabilities. The primary areas of activity involve the characterisation of the senior livehood in Europe, through the conduct of mini-etnographic studies, the promotion of physical and social spaces that value older individuals' contributions and the construction of a new ecological model for European care systems, including measures to support the change and transformation of health and care organisations and recommendations to establish new policies supporting senior autonomy and independent living, from companion robots to cognitive stimulation applications and ambient assisted living platforms.
The SHAPES Consortium also intends to establish a broad stakeholders' consultive council that takes part in key project activities, namely the think-tank sessions, the foresight exercises and the rich large-scale pilot campaign programme that, throughout two years, will validate across Europe, and with the support of more than 2000 older individuals, the benefits of the SHAPES digital solutions in the improvement of older individuals' autonomy, independence and quality of life.