Report

Teaser, summary, work performed and final results

Periodic Reporting for period 1 - ACROSSING (Advanced TeChnologies and PlatfoRm fOr Smarter ASsisted LivING)

Teaser

Assisted living in Smart Homes (SH) can change the way millions of the older people in Europe live, are cared, and manage their conditions and maintain wellbeing in the future. While today’s monitoring and assistance technologies are selectively deployed due to high cost...

Summary

Assisted living in Smart Homes (SH) can change the way millions of the older people in Europe live, are cared, and manage their conditions and maintain wellbeing in the future. While today’s monitoring and assistance technologies are selectively deployed due to high cost, limited functionality and interoperability issues, future SH could leverage from cheap ubiquitous sensors, interconnected smart objects, packaged with robust context inference and interaction techniques.

With the increasing ageing population and the growing demand on novel healthcare models, research on SH for independent living, self-management and wellbeing has intensified over the last decade. Yet it still remains a challenge to develop and deploy SH solutions that can handle everyday life situations and support a wide range of users and care applications.

To best leverage the SH potential, ACROSSING envisions an easy-to-use technology infrastructure which provides validated technology components and platforms built upon them. The technologies in the infrastructure should be modular and extensible, and can be re-used and automatically configured and integrated in a service infrastructure to facilitate wider adoption.

ACROSSING aims to combine the efforts of a multi-disciplinary network of 26 leading European research groups, industry partners, and user organisations, to develop an open SH technology infrastructure and train 15 ESRs across sectors on concepts and methodologies of SHs towards the PhD. To achieve this, ACROSSING designs 15 topically complementary research projects covering the four core SH research areas, i.e. sensing, context inference, human system interaction and service based infrastructure, and four main SH application categories, i.e. independent living with cognitive impairments, self-management of chronic diseases, wellbeing and empowerment of the elderly.

The ACROSSING network brings together all required knowledge, skills, and stakeholders to offer a comprehensive training programme including industry practice and longer-term benefit in establishing cross-institutional PhD programmes and further partner collaborations. This will ensure that ACROSSING realises maximum scientific, societal, economic and human (ESRs and stakeholders) values, thus leading to far-reaching long-standing impacts beyond the network

Overall objectives:

The project aims to change the way millions of the older people in Europe live and maintain wellbeing. The project aims to make a critical contribution towards an open smart home technology infrastructure by interlinking disciplines from sensing technologies, context inferences and interaction and considering key principles of social impact, ethics, security and privacy.

Scientific target:
Develop technologies for smart-home based assisted living, including 4 specialised technology infrastructures, a shared experiment data repository and guidelines for smart home development based on best-practice demonstrators.

Training target:
Educate 15 ESRs in multi-disciplinary, transferable skills to become future research leaders in assisted living and create networks for future collaborations among partners.

Social target:
Increase European innovation capacity and competitiveness in smart home technology through the collaboration of industry and academia by integrating 4 ICT-driven application demonstrators as best-practice examples for the envisioned open SH technology infrastructure.

Work performed

ACROSSING has been well coordinated, executed and implemented in accordance with the Annex 1. All planned actions, deliverables and intended impacts up to the end of periodic report 1 have been achieved as specified in the Annex 1. The following is a high-level summary of the work.

• ACROSSING was officially kicked off on 12th-13th Jan. 2016 at the consortium meeting in De Montfort University. All beneficiaries and one representative of the associate partners attended the event. At the meeting the DoA was thoroughly reviewed, analysed and tasks and roles were clearly specified to corresponding partners. The practice of project management was also agreed, namely via a regular monthly project meeting via teleconferencing facilities, i.e. Skype or Microsoft Lync. Face-to-face consortium meeting takes place in conjunction with training events.

• A financial arrangement has been agreed and a consortium agreement has been signed on due time.

• The network has successfully organised 4 training events and 3 scientific events at the network level. Training activities organised by individual beneficiaries, such as summer schools, research visits, totally over 24, have taken place in all beneficiaries.

• The mid-term review has been very successful. Both the external reviewer and EU officer commended highly for the organisation and delivery of the project.

• 15 ESRs have been recruited, and 14 of them is in place at the moment. All of them were enrolled as PhD candidates.

• By the time of periodic report 1, all planned deliverables and documents were submitted as planned with high quality. All milestones, MS1-MS4 have been reached.

• 28 secondments, and a number of research visits and outside-the-network training activities, e.g. summer school attendance, have been conducted.

• 23 research papers have been published or accepted, some of them have already been presented at conferences. A number of research papers are currently under review.

• Project promotion and publicity have been undertaken in a number of forms and events in accordance with the proposal, including the project website, Twitter account, project leaflet, poster and newsletter, and 3 news release, 14 project promotions and public engagement events, and 5 keynotes or invited talks in research and innovation conferences.

• Outreach and public engagement activities have been conducted at both network level and local level, including 2016 AHA Summit, 2017 EU AAL Forum.

Final results

Built upon the success of the project implementation, ACROSSING will make significant progress in the following aspects towards the end of the project.

• All ESRs are ready and well prepared to undertake novel and innovative research and development based on the knowledge and skills obtained from the systematic, interdisciplinary and cross-sector training activities, and also in-depth research understanding and capabilities acquired from literature review, project definition and research plan.

• All ESRs are well placed to produce research outputs, including scientific papers in both conferences and high-quality journals, and also technological and system prototypes.

• Integration and collaborations among ESRs and between sectors and disciplines will take place in a more intensive way as research and prototyping activities intensify, in particular, towards the preparation of the technology deliverables.

• With increasing research results, i.e. the availability of technologies and prototype systems, dissemination, publicity and exploitation activities will step up to achieve wider and far-reaching academic, social and economic impacts.

• User engagement and public engagement will increase as most individual projects come to the stage of testing and evaluation, or initial trial phase. This will help raise public awareness of technology usage for assisted living.

• All deliverables and milestones will be accomplished as planned.

Website & more info

More info: http://www.acrossing-itn.eu/.