VITALISE is a European-funded H2020 project coordinated by the European Network of Living Labs. Running from April 2021 to March 2024, VITALISE  tries to Harmonize the procedures and services of Health and Wellbeing Living Labs across Europe and beyond in order to make the Living Labs research infrastructure open and easily accessible to the research community in Europe and worldwide.

On 7^th of April 2021, AUTH Medical Physics Laboratory PostDoc Researcher Dr. Christos A. Frantzidis presented the recent advances of the utility of the short-arm human centrifuge as an efficient intervention for inducing motor neuroplasticity within the context of the 23^rd Humans in Space Symposium

ID Gaming is a new Erasmus+  project that aims to design a new kind of training game for people with cognitive deficits (PwlD) (i.e. neurodevelopmental or intellectual disabilities), in order to increase the competences of Persons with Intellectual Disabilities and related Professionals and Relatives in the implementation of ICT Serious Games for improving cognitive functions, and therefore, their Quality of Life.

On the last 9-10 February, took place the kick-off meeting of the new project HosmartAI – “Hospital Smart development based on AI”. The project is funded by €10 million under European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (Grant Agreement No 101016834). The meeting brought together the 24 partners of the consortium (which includes 3 large enterprises, 8 SMEs, 5 hospitals, 4 universities, 2 research centres and 2 associations), to discuss the project objectives and directions, its 10 work packages and its 8 large-scale pilots.

The Thessaloniki Active & Healthy Ageing Living Lab (Thess-AHALL) has recently published a new paper on “Teaching university students co-creation and living lab methodologies through experiential learning activities and preparing them for RRI” (Evdokimos Konstantinidis, Despoina Petsani, Panagiotis D. Bamidis, Feb 2021).

PROLONG is a project that designs and manufactures a portable device that can be worn or carried by the user and will be able to perform gait analysis, detect conditions of possible danger and generate an alert. The design, test and validation are done by constant involvement of final users that interact with PROLONG prototypes in various stages of the development and provide feedback. The first workshop for PROLONG system and their end-users was performed on November 2020, in Thessaloniki, Greece.

In 2019 the World Health Organization (WHO) declared 2020-2030 the decade of Healthy Ageing. By the end of this decade - in 2030 - the number of people 60 years and older will grow by 56 per cent, from 962 million (2017) to 1.4 billion (2030). By 2050, the global population of older people will be more than double to 2.1 billion.