Notícias

Cáritas Coimbra | International Conference Facing the challenge of an ageing population | Naples, Italy

The European Covenant on Demographic Change was kindly invited to share its framework and aim at networking and scale up age-friendly environments across Europe, on the last 13th October, at Naples, Italy.

Federico II University Hospital and Campania Region organised the Conference Facing the challenge of an ageing population, aimed at mainstreaming the good practices developed in European Regions in the context of active and healthy ageing.

The Covenant was presented by one of its Vice-Presidents, Carina Dantas (Cáritas Coimbra), that explained the reasons why this organisation was created and the potential it has and hopes to expand disseminating and connecting the best practices on AHA that exist throughout Europe.

Carina Dantas also presented to projects that are being developed in Cáritas Coimbra – project GrowMeUp and project IdoVis – as interesting practices that may be scaled-up to other regions in Europe.

GrowMeUp is an European project funded under the H2020 PHC-19-2014 “Advancing active and healthy ageing with ICT: service robotics within assisted living environments” call coordinated by the University of Coimbra and include a consortium formed by eight partners from 6 EU countries: Portugal, Switzerland, the Netherlands, Cyprus, Spain and France. It aims to provide an answer to the demographic change challenge, by providing an affordable service robotic system able to learn the older persons needs and habits over time and enhance (‘grow up’/scale up) its functionality to compensate for the elder’s degradation of abilities and support elderly to stay longer active, independent and socially involved, in carrying out their daily life at home.

IdoVis is a non-funded project that has ended its pilot phase in july 2016 and that created a group of autonomous elderly that visits other seniors with no support network and that are no longer independent in the development of their daily activities.

Health in all policies bridges technologies, life-long learning and age friendly tourism in the effort of turning the challenge of an ageing population into an opportunity of growth and development, by taking advantage of innovative approaches. Successful ageing requires a multidimensional and multidisciplinary approach, where stakeholders across local, national and international levels align their efforts.

Bringing together decision and policy makers with professionals and citizens, the conference was able to facilitate the exploitation of the good practices available in the different domains that influence healthy ageing with a life-course approach, that generates opportunities for the local development of a silver economy.