About
RADIO action
Societal Challenge
Demographic and epidemiologic transitions have brought a new health care paradigm with the presence of both, growing elderly population and chronic diseases. Life expectancy is increasing as well as the need for long-term care. Institutional care for the aged population faces economical struggles with low staffing ratios and consequent quality problems.
ICT technologies bring new opportunities for the ageing population in Europe
At the same time technical advancements in ICT, including robotics, bring new opportunities for the ageing population of Europe, the healthcare systems, as well as the European companies providing relevant technology and services at the global scale.
RADIO action’s four main dimensions:User acceptance, Integrated and power-aware data collection – transmission – processing, User interfaces and Architecture, will pave the way for wider deployment of technology solutions in active and healthy ageing, for integration of robots and smart home sensors in the Internet of Things and for larger penetration of technology – based solutions. In a wide-area ecosystem of RADIO deployments, different societal needs and health problems will be addressed by different configurations of the key enabling technologies.
RADIO develops an integrated smart home/assistant robot system
The consortium is pursuing a novel approach to acceptance and unobtrusiveness: a system where sensing equipment is not discrete but an obvious and accepted part of the user’s daily life. By using the integrated smart home/assistant robot system as the sensing equipment for health monitoring, we divert the users’ attention from the functionality of the sensors rather than from the sensors themselves. In this manner, sensors do not need to be discrete and distant or masked and cumbersome to install; they do however need to be perceived as a natural component of the smart home/assistant robot functionalities.