Value Ageing Seminar

ABSTRACTS

Arts & older people

Fionnuala Walsh, Head of Community and Participatory Arts with Arts Council of N. Ireland.

Fionnuala will present a brief overview of the Arts Council’s Arts & Older People Strategy and work of the Arts & Older People Programme to date. The presentation will focus on progress made towards the programme aims and outcomes and will be informed by findings from the recent Interim Evaluation Report of the programme.

Value Ageing: incorporating EU fundamental values into ICT for Ageing

Emilio Mordini, Director of the Centre for Science, Society and Citizenship, Rome.

No doubts that there are quite of serious ethical, social, and policy issues raised by the usage of ICT for assisting the frail older person. Among them I would like to emphasise one minor issue, which is however extremely relevant to me, I would like to call it “privacy as cortesia”. “Cortesia” is an Italian word that can be hardly translated as “courtesy”, actually it encompasses a wide range of concepts such as kindness, politeness, hospitality, respect. Finally I would like to advocate technologies which are “cortesi” with the older person.

Using Arts and Technology to generate creative solutions

Professor Ben Knapp, Director Institute for Creativity, Arts &Technology, Virginia Tech, USA.

Societal and industrial challenges demand creative processes that stem from the realization that design, aesthetic, and technological development now have become symbiotic. Form no longer follows function. Form and function are inseparable. This talk will explore several examples of trans-disciplinary project-based research that demonstrate this principle and gives a glimpse of where university and industrial research might be headed. Examples will be drawn from my own research on the study of human emotion in the arts and social sciences with direct application in supporting people as they age.

Scalable Technologies for Delivering Innovative Health Interventions

Professor Holly Jimison, Oregon Health & Science University, USA.

Most health care takes place in the home, especially for people with chronic diseases and conditions of aging. Often the most effective components of the management of these conditions have to do with improving health behaviors, such as exercise, diet and adherence to agreed-upon treatments. With escalating health care costs, it is important to focus on technologies that facilitate home-based care with less expensive personnel, trained to provide coaching for improving health behaviors. To address these issues, we have developed a software architecture and platform for health coaching

Value Ageing Seminar

that enables us to test new health care protocols based on feedback from sensor data in the home and patient interactions. This platform is designed to facilitate the management of sustained home-based interventions in an economically feasible fashion, using low-cost sensors and personnel trained in health behavior coaching. Although we currently test the system with less than 50 patients, the system is designed to enable a single coach to personally manage hundreds of patients by providing automated tailored messaging as a prompt for the coach to send to patients. These feedback and motivational messages are based on monitoring data, user models, and known principles of health behavior change. The approach is also designed to integrate patients and remote family members into the care team, with each receiving tailored feedback and action plans for home care. A key emphasis to this new approach to health management is to take advantage of the previously untapped resources of interested family members and the patients themselves, as having important roles and responsibilities. Additionally, the health protocols are designed to provide alerts and guidance to care personnel at the appropriate level, relying on lower-cost personnel explicitly trained for the interventions whenever possible. The design of this system has relied on input from our participants in the Oregon Center for Aging & Technology’s Living Lab. These seniors (average age of 85.4 years) have consented to have a variety of sensors and a computer with a Web camera placed in their homes. The sensors in the home include motion sensors, contact switches, phone activity sensors, wireless medication dispensers, and pressure mats. The participants have provided us with feedback in needs assessments, usability testing, and iterative debriefings as we deploy new technologies and intervention protocols.

There are several advancements to computer science, health psychology, and medical knowledge that are required to make this new approach to health care successful. Firstly, sophisticated user models are required to tailor messages appropriately. Secondly, authentication and data privacy algorithms are an important challenge. Thirdly, intelligent algorithms for inferring patient state from multiple noisy sensors are required. Examples include inferring sleep quality from bedroom motion sensors, medication adherence, cognitive measures (memory, divided attention, planning, etc.) from interactive computer games, and exercise level from a combination of activity and time on our exercise Web site. Finally, unobtrusive and low-cost monitoring have allowed us to monitor important new aspects of health in the home. For example, we now have measures of sleep quality, socialization, and cognitive performance. These new measures, inferred from continuous monitoring data in the home, provide us with trend information useful in the early detection of problems. The new measures and technologies for care management also allow us to explore and evaluate new therapies for important yet previously untreated issues in home health.

Value Ageing Seminar

Super Vivere: reflections on long life and ageing well across Europe

Maeve Rea1, Jennifer Rea2, Kasia Broszek3, Ewa Sikora3Anna Numminen4, Oskar Virras4Elisa Cevenni5, Laura Celani5, Claudio Franceschi5

Queens University Belfast1, Royal Free Hospital London2, UK, Nencki Institute of Experimental Biology, Warsaw3, Poland University of Tampere4, Finland Centro Interdipartimentale Luigi Galvani, University of Bologna5, Italy

‘Ninety year olds’ are survivors of their generation and are currently the fastest growing group in Western Europe. Survivors interest us all. We want to know what gives them their determination to go forward, how have they remained healthy and how have they escaped the various dangers of illness and degenerative disease throughout their long lives? About ten percent age slowly, combining long ‘lifespan’ and ‘health span’, often clustering in families. These nonagenarian families are reservoirs of genetic, life-style and behavioural information, which may help us dissect out how to live longer, and better. Through their ‘voices’ in text and their ‘images’, we hear something of how they understand their survivor hood.

The subject group was a purposeful sample of nonagenarian sibling pairs - five from each of four countries from the EU Genetics of Healthy Ageing (GeHA) study - Italy, Finland, Poland and Northern Ireland - who related a brief life story and gave their views about survivorship. More than half of nonagenarians said that ‘keeping going’ with a positive attitude and good social networks were very important in their survivor hood. With respect to life-style, about one third reported that hard work was the essence of their lives, while one fifth considered good simple food as important. Twenty percent considered that a family history of long-living family members or their genes were important; a similar number reported good health throughout all their lives. While across all countries, there were examples of nonagenarians with an optimistic attitude to life, there were differences; In Italy hard work and good health were considered the main stays of survivor hood; Irish nonagenarians ranked genes, health and food as the most important;. In Finland and Poland, a positive joyful attitude was considered intrinsic to survivorship, with hard work and keeping busy, a close second. All the nonagenarians valued good social networks.

Nonagenarians are telling us the same public health messages which today are recognised as being the basic building blocks of good health.

Value Ageing Seminar

The role of collaboration in trans-sectoral research

Rodd Bond, Director of the Netwell Centre, Dundalk Institute of Technology, Dundalk.

Netwell is attached to the School of Health and Science in the Dundalk Institute of Technology (DKIT) and located in Ireland’s smallest County: Louth. In 2008, 36% of the population (N=39,903) of Co Louth was described as living in areas of social deprivation (4th highest in the Republic of Ireland). Despite its constraints, Louth, with a focus on collaboration, partnership and innovation, has progressed as a leading exemplar of age friendly environments in Ireland. A member of Louth Age Friendly County Alliance tasked with delivering the WHO-framework based agenda, Netwell has played a key role in Louth’s achievements todate.

This paper will draw on the work of Teilhard de Chardin and Christopher Alexander and the experience of the Netwell Centre to demonstrate the importance of inter- and trans-disciplinary working to develop innovative, effective and sustainable solutions that enable people to age with dignity.

Demographic Change as a Catalyser for Knowledge Society

Marc Bovenschulte, VDI/VDE-IT, Berlin.

With prospective economic development in mind, demographic change most notably implies the maintenance of innovation capacity and productivity within an ageing society. However, isn’t innovation really a matter of the young? How are ageing workforces supposed to bring “the new” into the world? Reflecting some general tendencies concerning ageing workforce and the way innovative production processes are organised, it is assumed that network structures could be spearheading the productive knowledge society. Due to their functional characteristics, those structures can deal with demographic change through their own intrinsic logic and thus value the potential of the older.

Looking from conceptual to explorative innovators and from liquid to crystalline intelligence, the potential of “aged” knowledge is as essential for competitiveness as the “fresh” state of the art knowledge. Many times, SMEs in particular do not seem to have a sufficiently developed absorptive capacity in order to integrate these different types of innovation-relevant knowledge. Therefore, cooperation structures as offered in networks and clusters might provide not only a structural but a conceptual framework to fully benefit from the potential of an aged, yet highly qualified workforce (better: “thinkforce”). Most notably, knowledge driven, high-tech oriented clusters might accelerate the heterogeneous knowledge absorption that results in avant-garde innovation processes in demographic change.

Value Ageing Seminar

Telecare for older people: promoting independence, participation and identity

Alison Bowes, and Gillian McColgan, University of Stirling, Stirling, Scotland.

Drawing on interviews with 76 older (60+) people receiving telecare services at home and in housing with care and 16 family caregivers in West Lothian, Scotland, the presentation will consider how far telecare can support older people’s citizenship goals of independence, participation and identity. It concludes that whilst these goals are to some extent supported by telecare, they are also supported by the model of care being applied and limited by aspects of the wider environment, such as ageism. It is argued that in every case, contextual factors beyond the intrinsic capacities of a technological system and beyond the models of care developed and promoted by a service delivery organisation must be explored if the impact of telecare is to be fully understood. Thus the human use of technology and its moral context are critical to its success or limitation.

I-TRAVLE : Enhancing likeability in training for stroke and MS patients

Prof. Karin Coninx, Vice-Dean of the Faculty of Sciences, Hasselt University, Belgium.

A multidisciplinary consortium realized the I-TRAVLE system to train the upper limbs of MS and stroke patients. The rehabilitation robotics system makes use of haptic feedback in a virtual learning environment that was specifically developed for these training programs, and that is supported by a therapist interface. In order to motivate the patients for the training, techniques such as games, social gaming, personalization and adaptivity are applied in the training exercises to enhance their likeability.

The presentation starts from the goals of the project to highlight some aspects of the user-centred process that was used to realize the I-TRAVLE system. The aforementioned techniques to enhance the likeability of the training exercises are illustrated in selected games.

European impact assessment toolkit for cross-border cooperation

Ruth Taillon, Deputy Director (Research) at the Centre for Cross Border Studies.

Ruth will introduce the Impact Assessment Toolkit for Cross-Border Cooperation that has recently been adopted by the Special EU Programmes Body as the required methodology for new applications to the INTERREG IVA Programme. This Toolkit is a practical ‘user-friendly’ guide to the planning of cross-border projects and programmes in six key analytical steps: commencing with defining the problem to be addressed and finishing with the development of a monitoring and evaluation framework to capture the change achieved. The Toolkit includes examples, guiding questions and cases studies. In addition to helping to identify the expected social, economic and environmental impacts of a proposed programme or project, the Toolkit will help to determine whether a cross-border approach is appropriate and to identify and capture evidence of the added value of the cooperation process.