Analysis Responses

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How does a (smart) age-friendly ecosystem look in a post-pandemic society?

Category: User Experience

Journal paper: Abstract: COVID-19 has impacted not only the health of citizens, but also the various factors that make up our society, living environments, and ecosystems. This pandemic has shown that future living will need to be agile and flexible to adapt to the various changes in needs of societal populations. Digital technology has played an integral role during COVID-19, assisting various sectors of the community, and demonstrating that smart cities can provide opportunities to respond to many future societal challenges. In the decades ahead, the rise in aging populations will be one of these challenges, and one in which the needs and requirements between demographic cohorts will vary greatly. Although we need to create future smart age-friendly ecosystems to meet these needs, technology still does not feature in the WHO eight domains of an age-friendly city. This paper extends upon Marston and van Hoof's ?mart Age-friendly Ecosystem' (SAfE) framework, and explores how digital technology, design hacking, and research approaches can be used to understand a smart age-friendly ecosystem in a post-pandemic society. By exploring a series of case studies and using real-life scenarios from the standpoint of COVID-19, we propose the ?oncept of Age-friendly Smart Ecologies (CASE)' framework. We provide an insight into a myriad of contemporary multi-disciplinary research, which are capable to initiate discussions and bring various actors together with a positive impact on future planning and development of age-friendly ecosystems. The strengths and limitations of this framework are outlined, with advantages evident in the opportunity for towns, regions/counties, provinces, and states to take an agile approach and work together in adopting and implement improvements for the greater benefits of residents and citizens.

Category: User Experience

Journal paper: Abstract: In March 2020 the United Nations published an open brief for the creative community to propose interventions to the unfolding COVID-19 pandemic. However, when faced with unprecedented wicked problems such as these, the rigour of design and creative processes can tested. COVID-19 has demonstrated how important human centred design responses are in understanding the worldviews and ecosystems of users. Ad hoc design responses or design hacks have demonstrated that they have a role to play in how we create our future individual, community and societal ecosystems. In terms of age friendly design, this pandemic makes us envision what should be, furthermore, how we could create better products and services through technology. For our ageing communities ?ocooning' and other social restriction measures have exposed technological deficiencies for the needs of older people and opens up questions of our future preparedness for a growing ageing society. Now more than ever, designers need to understand the behavioural mind-set of older people in their own ecosystem and understand existing mental models. In this opinion piece we posit what acts of design hacking can lead us to greater understanding of users mental models and therefore better understanding of technology needs for both older and younger adults. While presenting various examples of how design hacking is conducted by citizens and participants alike, it shows that it offers designers differing perspectives, experiences and inspiration for technology.

Neighbourhoods of the Future

Category: Other

The Agile Ageing Alliance (AAA) aims to demonstrate that through innovations in technology, business and service models, our homes and multigenerational neighbourhoods of the future can be reimagined to boost health and wellbeing, and promote independent living, leading to a reduction in the financial burden on Citizens and State. AAA asked expert stakeholders what, in an ideal world, our homes and neighbourhoods could look like in 10 to 20 years, and what steps must be taken now to disrupt the status quo and make their vision a reality?Neighbourhoods of the Future captures the thoughts and predictions of a veritable `who's who' of distinguished experts and emerging thought leaders.

PHArA-ON

Category: Projects

PHArA-ON project will maximise the use of advanced services, devices, and tools from IoT, artificial intelligence and robotics to cloud computing, smart wearables, Big Data and intelligent analytics. Its aim is to create a set of integrated and highly customisable interoperable open platforms. Platform interoperability will be implemented within Pharaon ecosystems and platforms, which will be validated in two stages: pre-validation and large-scale pilots (LSPs) conducted at pilot sites in Italy, Netherlands, Portugal, Slovenia and Spain (Murcia and Andalusia).

Category: User Experience

Ambient assisted living (AAL) technologies are increasingly presented and sold as essential smart additions to daily life and home environments that will radically transform the healthcare and wellness markets of the future. An ethical approach and a thorough understanding of all ethics in surveillance/monitoring architectures are therefore pressing. AAL poses many ethical challenges raising questions that will affect immediate acceptance and long-term usage. Furthermore, ethical issues emerge from social inequalities and their potential exacerbation by AAL, accentuating the existing access gap between high-income countries (HIC) and low and middle-income countries (LMIC). Legal aspects mainly refer to the adherence to existing legal frameworks and cover issues related to product safety, data protection, cybersecurity, intellectual property, and access to data by public, private, and government bodies. Successful privacy-friendly AAL applications are needed, as the pressure to bring Internet of Things (IoT) devices and ones equipped with artificial intelligence (AI) quickly to market cannot overlook the fact that the environments in which AAL will operate are mostly private (e.g., the home). The social issues focus on the impact of AAL technologies before and after their adoption. Future AAL technologies need to consider all aspects of equality such as gender, race, age and social disadvantages and avoid increasing loneliness and isolation among, e.g. older and frail people. Finally, the current power asymmetries between the target and general populations should not be underestimated nor should the discrepant needs and motivations of the target group and those developing and deploying AAL systems. Whilst AAL technologies provide promising solutions for the health and social care challenges, they are not exempt from ethical, legal and social issues (ELSI). A set of ELSI guidelines is needed to integrate these factors at the research and development stage.

Category: Other

The SCIROCCO self-assessment tool is an online self- assessment tool with an objective to assess a region's readiness for integrated care. It builds on the conceptual Maturity Model for Integrated Care developed by the B3 Action Group on Integrated Care of the European Innovation Partnership on Active and Healthy Ageing.

The State of Housing in Europe 2021

Category: User Experience

Challenges and responses from the public, cooperative and social housing sector

Category: Data Sets

Interactive data base which includes the numerous data sets (population and gender, economy, sustainable development goals, millennium development goals etc)

Category: Projects

WHO Global Network of Age-friendly Cities and Communities is a global community that works together towards a vision of an age-friendly world. Age-friendly World creates a place for people and organizations all over the world to share what they know and learn from others.A city or community can remain a member of the Network for as long as they can demonstrate continual improvement against developed indicators.