Municipalities that take responsibility to care for their older citizens seem more willing to coordinate the implementation of AAL solutions into their community, enabling them to live longer more independent lives at home.

The University of Applied Sciences in St. Gallen has built an AAL Living Lab (LL) in the East of Switzerland and one of the biggest challenges moving forward expanding the project, is implementing AAL solutions in small and rural settings. 

Urs Guggenbühl, co-director of Competence Centre AAL and Sabina Misoch, director at IKOA, both from the university will be collectively leading the workshop with the help of two workshop speakers, Natalia Bezzola from the Municipal Council of Speicher and Claudia Fichtner president of a retirement home in Trogen, Switzerland.

QUICK-FIRE Q&A with URS GUGGENBÜHL

What makes the format of your workshop different to others?

Municiple employees from the east of Switzerland will share their views on the issue of involving municipalities in promoting AAL solutions and present initial results and how they plan on implementing adequate AAL solutions. Based on this first report, participants will be split into four groups to discuss all four questions on: the survey; internationalising the strategy; the market; small and rural settings.

Who should attend and why?

Local actors and municipalities who wish to implement AAL successfully. Also, we recommend SMEs that are looking for markets in which to implement their technology; people who have not found a way to implement solutions that support older adults at home on a large scale; and those interested in implementing concrete projects as there will be opportunities to connect with people with similar interests and learn from other’s experiences. 

What are you hoping to achieve and what will those attending take away?

We hope to gain more insight on how to encourage municipalities to promote and implement AAL solutions in their constituency. The participants will get valuable information from other regions and positions (politics, industry, research) as they network in groups during the workshop breakout sessions.

The purpose of this workshop is two-fold: To build awareness of stigmatising products during the design and communication processes to create products in the future that do not stigmatise the silver age; To collect data and insights on stigmatisation across the EU and to broaden the scope of this knowledge base.

Alain Denis, managing director at Yellow Window, a consortium partner in the Active Advice Project, has ample experience and knowledge on product and service development and their introduction. He will be coordinating the workshop, the structure of which will include defining the stigma, stigma in the silver economy, a presentation from a representative, group interactive work assisted by Diana Goderich (Yellow Window) looking at destigmatising original products and tools and methods to do this during the design, development and launch stages and concluding discussions with feedback.

Alain Denis

Tanguy de Briey

Diana Goderich Dmitrievskaya

Nicola Filizola, Communication and Public Affairs Officer of the AAL Programme, will organise this session. 

We are all well aware that Europe is facing accelerating economic, social and healthcare challenges from demographic change. The AAL programme together with the complementary activities in Horizon 2020, the EIP AHA and the EIT Health, constitutes one of the world’s largest research and innovation initiatives addressing Active & Healthy Ageing. The AAL believes that it can make a real contribution to this process by capitalizing on the networks and collaborative support actions developed by AAL and other European programmes in the past – by taking them to the next level. It’s time to interconnect regional and national innovation networks in Europe and transform them into viable, practice-oriented eco-systems. In this session, the AAL team would like to exchange with its community and gather various point of views and suggestions in this area aiming to get your vision of ageing well in Europe over the coming decade.

Nowadays with emerging technologies, connected devices and IoT-based appliances, we are living in a world where information and data are extremely accessible, but less easy to be controlled and owned. However, this is still a gap that is preventing senior users benefiting from marketable AAL solutions.

John McGrory (lecturer) and Matteo Zallio (researcher) from Dublin Institute of Technology have run successful workshops at two previous AAL Forums and will be bringing their experience and expertise back for a third year running to discuss a new approach, “citizigner”, placing citizens as designers.

The workshop will involve a collective brainstorming session, identifying the implications of only partially actively involving users who are not really satisfied with this process. Participants will then be split into focus groups where they will each share experiences of existing citizigner approaches. There will then be a final discussion and consolidation of group feedback before the stakeholders are involved in the design of a blueprint.

John McGrory

Matteo Zallio