Despite the proliferation of ICT solutions for personalized healthcare, there is still no easy way to provide older adults with integrated coaching services. Council of Coaches (COUCH) introduces a radically new virtual coaching concept based on multiple autonomous, embodied virtual coaches, which form together a personal council that fulfills the needs of older adults in an integrated way. Each Coach has his own expertise, personality and style of coaching; they might not always agree with each other, but they all share a single goal: to support you across every aspect of well-being, including physical, social, cognitive and mental support. The Council members listen to you, inform you, help you to set personal goals and inspire you to take control of your health. Give the council your thoughts, or listen and observe how the individual Coaches exchange their views on numerous issues. Apply your new skills in daily life and if the need arises, contact any of the coaches anytime, anywhere. COUCH will be empowered by a novel Open Agent Platform, providing core functionalities for the development and deployment of Coaches, including technologies for non-obtrusive interactions between the user and the Coaches. To this end, leading edge spoken dialogue interaction technologies will be provided as embodied conversational agents that will join in conversations with the user. The platform will not be confined to a constrained number of Coaches – rather it will enable developers and innovators to introduce new Coaches that provide additional knowhow and services. Hence, COUCH will enable a new virtual coaching ecosystem, bringing together healthcare services providers with innovators to implement novel ideas. Plans for the sustainability and wider use of its paradigm will be based on the expansion and support of this ecosystem at EU scale, including linking with the partners’ business networks and the FIWARE & universAAL communities.

Active ageing along with work ability frameworks contributed mostly to inform policies and development of research methods rather than concrete solutions such as technologies and applications. Ageing citizen face particular difficulties in remaining active if having reduced capabilities due to age-related conditions and challenges posed by knowledge digitalization, the accessibility of digital channels, digital interfaces and digital socialization. CO-ADAPT proposes a framework that provides principles for a two-way adaptation in support of ageing citizens. 1) Human Adaptation Support: CO-ADAPT empowers ageing citizen to adapt to changed conditions through a personalised Artificial Intelligence (AI) conversational agent providing comprehensive change support based on language and physiological analytics. 2) Work Systems Adaptations: CO-ADAPT defines three types of smart adaptations in work systems with different level of technology sophistication to age thresholds in smart shift scheduling tools, to individual capabilities considering cognitive workload in assembly stations, adaptations to work tasks in contextually recommending people, documents and applications for cognitive augmentation. The evaluation approach is focussed on quantifying economical benefits in terms of improved work ability. It includes a comparative trial of the Human Adaptation Support, the personalised conversational agent application, in north and south Europe for investigating cultural applicability. The Work Systems Adaptations are trialled in real environments with an extensive pilot for the smart shift scheduling tools in Finland (N=20 000), and more focused trials with sophisticated prototypes for the assembly station adaptations in Italy and contextual entity recommender in Finland. The consortium includes comprehensively stakeholders and disciplines geared for a participatory design approach, compliance with ethical and data directives, and effective exploitation of results.

Multi-morbid complex chronic conditions (CCCs) are highly prevalent in patients with Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD). As they have common risk factors and overlapping symptoms, this easily leads to delay of appropriate treatment. Timely and preventive care is essential, as exacerbations of COPD and CCCs are detrimental to patient, health and social outcomes. RE-SAMPLE will take a giant leap in the field of CCC disease management building upon and going beyond existing initiatives, towards evidence-based, inclusive, preventive care and targeted treatment, enabling to “treat a person, not the disease(s)”. RE-SAMPLE will create a knowledge base of multimodal data from health records, clinical studies, expert and patient knowledge and guidelines, and extend this with state-of-the-art Real World Data collection. Predictive modelling through privacy-preserving Artificial Intelligence (AI), will increase the understanding of CCCs including the interdependence of multi-morbidities, and evidence in effective interventions for CCC disease management. The inclusive design and citizen science approach, provides us with credible and accepted RWD tools and a patient-centred eHealth “companionship programme”. GDPR-compliance is carefully integrated from the beginning, and our platform allows for a strong advancement in secure algorithms using multi-party computation. Our AI approach enables statistical validation following clinical standards and useful explanations to build up clinical evidence and trust by the users. As such RE-SAMPLE will act upon the need for diversified, personalized care to alleviate the overall societal and economic burden of these CCCs. The RE-SAMPLE project significantly impact towards this direction not only through the development of the platform and companionship programme, but also through its implementation throughout Europe, enabling and guiding healthcare organizations its uptake in the privacy-sensitive domain of healthcare.

One out of six people in the European Union has a disability, usually caused by an acute episode or a chronic disease. Providing a suitable rehabilitation is the main issue for people as they age as it helps people to live independently and enhance their Quality of Life. However, as the rehabilitation period usually last some months, the continuity of care often is interrupted in the transition from the hospital to the home. Virtual Coaches can help these patients to proceed with a personalized rehabilitation that complies to age-related conditions, as the key technology for empowering patients through the enhancement of the adherence to the care plan and the risk prevention. The project “vCare” (Virtual Coaching Activities for Rehabilitation in Elderly) addresses two major shortcomings of the status quo: a participatory design driven by users’ needs and the personalization of the care pathways enabled by technology. In fact that rehabilitation is an ideal setting as “users” (physicians and patients) interact together for a “long” period into the clinic (from two weeks to two months): this is a good opportunity to embed into the knowledge of the system the clinical profiles and the pathways that will drive the behaviour of the virtual coach at home. Well-elaborated services for tele-rehabilitation of former EU projects, such as eWall or Miracolus Life, will be adapted. Therefore, the system will integrate a semantic layer (universAAL) including a reasoning engine that merges all patient-related and context information together. The advanced services of vCare will be deployed on a reference platform of MYSPHERA (FIWARE-based) and implemented in four reference sites, dealing with commonly impacted domains (neurological and cardiological). The results of vCare shall stimulate the European Healthcare & ICT sector for innovations in the field of integrated care. In sum, vCare will contribute to the EU goal to increase healthy life years of Europeans by two until 2020.

The EVOSST project aims to improve the efficiency and understanding of social services within the European Union, aligning with the European Pillar of Social Rights and the EU's long-term budget for social inclusion and cohesion. The project focuses on developing advanced models for a comprehensive life-course impact assessment, providing insights into the long-term effects of social services, and covering healthcare, childcare, long-term care, education, and inclusion. This aligns with the EU's ambition for sustainable development and inclusive growth, moving towards a 'beyond GDP perspective'. The integration of well-being metrics reflects the EU's emphasis on improving the quality of life, including health and education, and enhancing societal well-being and social cohesion, along with the development of an integrated policy framework for social services echoes the EU's strategic direction for streamlined and effective social service delivery. EVOSST's integration of technological impact and digital technology in social services is an applied vision aligning with the European Commission's Digital Education Action Plan (2021-2027). The project applies this directive to the broader realm of social services, utilizing technologies to enhance service delivery, assessment, and user experience. The project's ambition is not only to enhance the effectiveness of social services but also to revolutionize the way their impacts are measured and understood, informing more effective policies and practices.