SMILE – Providing digitalised prevention & prediction support for ageing people in smart living environments – Midterm results: Looking back and looking ahead

News Item – 15 August 2022

A collaborative project – SMILE – was launched in early 2021 funded by both the European Commission and Canada to create smart inclusive living environments (SLE) for older people with novel e-health solutions.

In a nutshell, our project, driven by a consortium of 13 international partners from the EU and Canada, aims to help frail, older people to ‘age in place’. For this, we develop unique SMILE technology and create SMart Inclusive Living Environments supported by innovative e-health solutions. We do this by taking practical situations that older people face daily with serious health conditions, especially dementia or COPD. We actively involve groups of users in living laboratories through co-creation workshops not only in the testing of technologies but also in the design and capacity-building processes. Our vision is that the results of SMILE will be widely disseminated and benefit very heterogeneous populations of older people in our societies.

RESULTS AND ACHIEVEMENTS TO DATE

We aim to offer acceptable digital solutions when they are introduced into older people’s lives. To this end, as the first and most important step, we identified what frail, older people need and what their preferences are for using new technologies to support their health and maintain their daily activities. Work has started on the development of an intelligent AI-based system, a conversational agent (CA) and a digital care facilitator (DFC) to proactively support older people in managing their everyday lives in their home environment.

In parallel, work has started in four living labs in four countries – the Netherlands, Denmark, Canada, and Norway. The first phase of the co-creation workshop series was completed. The results showed that the top 4 features that users, healthcare staff, and stakeholders find important to get support with, are: clinical condition, physical activity, social health, and sleep quality. Now we are working on achieving these four features in the CA and the DCF. To support the smart living environment ecosystems, a digital solutions platform was also developed to enable SMEs to propose innovative solutions for remote/connected care and smart homes for older people.

In the meantime, we also published several scientific studies internationally to contribute to the body of scientific knowledge in our research area and increase visibility.

WHAT’S NEXT?

The prototype development of the SMILE package is underway, and further co-creation workshops are in preparation, followed by testing and evaluation at a later stage to explore the impact of the SMILE ecosystems on the social well-being of the end users. The Model of Assessment of Telemedicine framework (MAST) will be used to assess the living labs and the technology. So far, we have 11 digital solutions in our catalogue, but we are still waiting for applications from SMEs to add their e-health solutions.

We are also looking for active learning opportunities with Canada and a study tour is planned for Autumn 2022. In the longer term, the plan is to create a cloud-based SMILE brokerage platform for EU-Canada cooperation in ICT for active and healthy ageing, which will continue after the current project is completed.

Finally, educational programmes and materials will be developed and tested both for the design process and for building the competence and capacity of all user groups, including caregivers. We will also seek to involve policymakers in this process through webinars to inform and engage them, and thus strengthen future support for our area.

With this combined package and related service improvements, we believe SMILE will go beyond the state-of-the-art in ways that are sustainable, scalable and exploitable. SMILE will lead to better coordination of care and support, establishing market “pull” requiring technological solutions, and organisational and policy adaption.

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