Smart, Personalized and Adaptive ICT Solutions for Active, Healthy and Productive Ageing with enhanced Workability
According to WHO, about 30% of men and women in the age group of 50-64 years are considered to need urgent adjustments at work due to health problems related e.g. to musculoskeletal and mental disorders, to prevent the risk of early retirement and work disability. To tackle the abovementioned challenges, Ageing@Work -a three year EU-funded HORIZON 2020 project- aims to develop a series of highly adaptive, personalized ICT tools for the ageing workers' working and living environments, to allow them to remain healthy, active and productive for longer.
Ageing@Work will deliver a novel ICT-based, personalized system to support ageing workers (aged 50+) into designing fit-for-purpose work environments and managing flexibly their evolving needs. Advanced dynamically adapted virtual models of workers will incorporate specificities in respect to skills, physical, cognitive and behavioral factors, being extended from the work context to personal life aspects interacting with workability, health and well-being. Virtual workplace models will encode characteristics of the workplace (factory, outdoor work site, home), at both physical and semantic, resource/process levels. On top of the models, computational intelligence will be responsible to:
- Assess user specificities and needs i.r.t. work conditions, both in terms of ergonomics, health and safety issues and task assignments.
- Perform personalized predictive simulations on workability, health and well-being.
Recommendations will then be provided both to the worker and company (under strict privacy restrictions), on how the working conditions must adapt. The worker models will be populated by highly unobtrusive worker sensing, both at work, at home and on the move. To foster workability and productivity, highly personalized, intuitive, age-friendly productivity, co-design enhancement tools will be developed, including ones for AR/VR-based context-awareness and telepresence, lifelong learning and knowledge sharing. On top of these, a novel Ambient Virtual Coach (AVC) will encompass an empathic mirroring avatar for subtle notifications provision, an adaptive Visual Analytics –based personal dashboard, and a reward-based motivation system targeting positive and balanced worker behavior at work and personal life, towards a novel paradigm of ambient support into workability and well-being. The integrated system will be developed by user-centered design and will be evaluated at two pilot sites, related to core Industry 4.0 processes of mining and machines production.
