Assessing the State of the Art and Supporting an Evidence-Based Uptake and Evolution of Open Service Platforms in the Active and Healthy Ageing Domain
Ageing presents one of the greatest socio-economic challenges of the 21st century. According to estimates more than 20% of Europeans will be 65 or older by 2025. Reacting to related puzzlements of demographic shifts and ageing in general, and guaranteeing the availability of the required structure to help Europe utilise the active and healthy ageing sector’s opportunities, the EU has devoted a high level of resources to ICT projects in the field of active and healthy ageing. As such a considerable number of open source platforms for the development of innovative solutions in the AHA domain have been created. These platforms, such as universAAL and FIWARE and several others, are operational on similar services within the same domain, either competing or complementing each-other, urging for more interoperability among them.
Responding to the numerous critical voices that have been raised due to the persisting fragmentation of the active and healthy ageing market; and the lack of interoperability of the various solutions deployed or difficulties with the large scale uptake of the platforms by their targeted users, the aim of the PlatformUptake.eu project is to observe, analyse and understand the whole ecosystem of open service platforms and their related networks, and depict a picture describing the whole ecosystem with its achievements and potentials, targeting all user groups while also generating synergies among platforms and their related projects in the AHA and IoT domain. For a period of 26 months, the PlatformUptake.eu project will assess the societal impact of existing platforms, create monitoring and evaluation toolkits, collect successful user stories and best practices, promote interoperability and define guidelines for a common evolution of such platforms within existing policy frameworks and initiatives. Seeking to support the largescale uptake of the platforms, PlatformUptake.eu proposes the creation of an online information hub which provides descriptive and support materials on all existing platforms, the organisation of several stakeholder events, as well as a Massive Open Online Course for promoting synergies, knowledge exchange and a common understanding among all stakeholders in the Active and Healthy Ageing market.
PlatformUptake.eu project is a Coordination and Support Action funded by the European Commission under the H2020 programme. The consortium is composed by 12 partners from 10 different European countries.