Project Background

In Europe’s rapidly ageing society, there is growing need for tools that improve the quality of life, independence and overall health of older adults. Advanced ICT solutions that combine technologies from multiple disciplines can address this problem, but the market is fragmented and many solutions have limited scope.

Image: grey haired women goes running
Two hands are holding a tablet running a smart home application

PHArA-ON’s overall objective is to make smart and active living for Europe’s ageing population a reality by creating a set of integrated, highly customizable and interoperable open platforms with advanced services, devices, and tools including IoT, artificial intelligence (AI), robotics, cloud/edge computing, smart wearables, big data, and intelligent analytics. Data privacy, cybersecurity, interoperability and openness will be key design principles to pursue through the requirements generated by PHArA-ON experts. PHArA-ON will be built upon mature existing state-of-the-art open platforms and technologies/tools provided by the partners, which will be customised and will implement cloud technologies, AI techniques and traditional algorithms for big data intelligent analytics. A user-centric approach will be followed.

PHArA-ON’s integrated platforms will be validated in two stages: pre-validation and large-scale pilots (LSPs), in six different pilot sites: Murcia and Andalusia (Spain), Portugal, The Netherlands, Slovenia and Italy. A team of partners in each pilot will ensure its right development. A set of development tools will be created and made publicly available to simplify the customisation and integration. These tools and the results of dissemination will spread the generated knowledge to promote the development of new solutions similar to PHArA-ON.

Two men are using a smart device