ComfortAge: towards integrated and personalised dementia and frailty care in Europe

The TIC Salut Social Foundation participates in ComfortAge, a new international project that strives to foster a significant change in dementia and frailty care in Europe through the development of holistic and integrated health models that are tailored to the individual needs of people with age-related mental and physical illnesses and disorders. The project will create a virtual health platform based on artificial intelligence to centralise resources for risk factor analysis, early diagnosis and personalized decision-making.

The project officially began last January in Athens, Greece, at a meeting with participation from its 39 organisations, coming from research centres, universities, entities in the field of health and social assistance, associations, non-profit foundations, and technological and legal companies from 12 European countries. The project has a duration of four years and a budget of €17 million of the Horizon Europe programme under the call HORIZON-HLTH-2023-STAYHLTH-01.

ComfortAge Goals

As the project explains in the newsletter just published, ComfortAge represents a pioneering effort to address the challenges of population ageing, dementia and frailty. Through the combination of clinical experience, technological innovation and the involvement of the community, the project aims to improve people’s quality of life and advance in the field of intervention and personalized prevention in the field of socio-health care, putting in place a pan-European framework with community prevention and intervention strategies that facilitate positive and effective lifestyle changes.

In the field of clinical innovation, the project will conduct research studies to determine risk factors and be able to make personalised prediction, analyse AI-based medical devices and integrated data sources of age-related clinical evidence, and perform tests based on sanitary technology assessment. It will also have working groups focused on cutting edge innovation, which will focus on explainable artificial intelligence projects, serious games, digital twins of patients and virtual assistance technologies. All to be able to facilitate the making of reliable, precise, safe and personalised clinical decisions.

To facilitate and promote research activities in the field of health and well-being, the project will also promote hubs of digital innovation, with home automation projects (smart men), robotics and Living Labs. Finally, it will foster social innovations to co-create solutions to assist and improve social integration and interaction.

Representation of Catalonia in the project

The TIC Social Health Foundation will participate in working groups related to the governance of AI for personalised prediction, monitoring and recommendations, specifically contributing its expertise in explainability models (LAMB) and reliable artificial intelligence (trustworthy AI). It will also be part of the tasks of assessing the impact of health technology, to guarantee, among others, the development of tools for a transparent and ethical AI, and of the tasks of exploitation, dissemination, standardisation and adoption of technology. In this last block, the Foundation will work in coordination with the Integrated Social and Health Care Agency to contribute to the construction of an ecosystem of integrated care and the scalability of the solution. 

Also participating in the project is the ACE Foundation, who has been working in Barcelona since 1995 to advance the diagnosis, treatment, research, training and awareness of Alzheimer’s disease and other causes of dementia.