Text by: Mª José Hernández & Rosa Almeida – INTRAS Foundation
The WorkingAge project started in February 2019 funded within the topic “SC1-DTH-03-2018 – Adaptive smart working and living environments supporting active and healthy ageing”.
A user-centred approach with the development of the WAOW (WorkingAge Of Well-being) Tool and the In-lab test phase took place. Last year we face new challenges by the COVID-19 pandemic that required important adaptation in the project, and highlighted the need to invest in prevention, in promoting accessibility and person-centred digital solutions. In short, consensus on the need to move forward and invest in wellbeing and quality of life was widespread.
The COVID-19 pandemic has reinforced the importance of having resilient health and social services systems, and equipped with technological capability and knowledge to readily face similar situations.
The COVID-19 outbreak and subsequent lock-down measures paved the way for the acceleration of digital transformation as companies have shifted operations to cope with office closure, restricted mobility and supply disruption. Experts warn that this collective response should focus not only on immediate actions, but also on transformative actions to enable sustained resilience.
This crisis has made it clear that, in many organizations, that digitalization processes for business continuity were not mature enough. However, the prospect of long-term economic paralysis lead organizations to prioritize investments in long-term resilience over daily operational needs. Also basic trends, like teleworking, will continue. As for the safety and security requirements that were already key, they will continue to gain importance and have an impact on sustainable development. Companies will further invest in the use of technologies to improve their production processes and improve the occupational health and well-being of their workers (one of their main assets). Therefore, the COVID-19 pandemic act as a driver of the digital revolution in the workplace across many levels.
Digital services, if implemented correctly, can be the right tools to address many of these challenges. In fact, this may be an opportunity for European projects, such as those funded under the same topic as the WorkingAge project (SC1-DTH-03-2018), as now we understand how they could have been useful if they were fully available on the market.
A list of the mentioned projects is briefly presented:
- AGEING@WORK: “Smart, Personalized and Adaptive ICT Solutions for Active, Healthy and Productive Ageing with enhanced Workability”
Ageing@Work project provides workers with a range of productivity enhancement, remote collaboration and health promotion digital tools taking advantage of cutting-edge technologies such as Augmented Reality and Virtual Coaching, to promote independent working and living of ageing workers, and offers a novel integrated platform tailored to worker needs and provide physical and mental health support. The approach is focused on the remote collaboration of workers, knowledge sharing, lifelong training, and situation awareness, to help workers to maintain productivity and workability for longer, while achieving a balance between work and personal life, and promoting active and healthy ageing both at work and at home.
https://ageingatwork-project.eu
- BIONIC: “Personalised Body Sensor Networks with Built-In Intelligence for Real-Time Risk Assessment and Coaching of Ageing workers, in all types of working and living environments”
BIONIC develop an integrated, instructive, autonomous and privacy-protecting platform for real-time risk assessment and permanent coaching allowing the design of workplace interventions for specific elderly workers’ profiles. The concept advances medical wearable technology integrating sensor modules in multi-direction and configurable body sensor networks. BIONIC relies on a multidisciplinary group of researchers from the domains of wearable electronics, artificial intelligence and wearables for health applications and experts in ergonomics and anthropometry, occupational safety and health, data analytics and system security, and personal data protection.
- CO-ADAPT: “Adaptive Environments and Conversational Agent Based approaches for Healthy Ageing and Work Ability”
CO-ADAPT is a project aimed at investigating how technologies in work and life should adapt to change conditions due to ageing and at the same time provide support for people in behaviour change to improve wellbeing and workability. CO-ADAPT proposes a framework that provides principles for a two-way adaptation in support of ageing citizens. 1) Human Adaptation Support: CO-ADAPT empowers ageing citizen to adapt to changed conditions through a personalised Artificial Intelligence (AI) conversational agent providing comprehensive change support based on language and physiological analytics. 2) Work Systems Adaptations: CO-ADAPT defines three types of smart adaptations in work systems with different level of technology sophistication to age thresholds in smart shift scheduling tools, to individual capabilities considering cognitive workload in assembly stations, adaptations to work tasks in contextually recommending people, documents and applications for cognitive augmentation.
- SEE FAR: “Smart glasses for multifacEted visual loss mitigation and chronic disEase prevention indicator for healthier, saFer, and more productive workplAce foR ageing population”
SEE FAR is a digitally enabled adaptive solution supporting the ageing workforce with vision deficiencies to remain actively involved in their professional life, helping them to sustain and renew their work and personal life related skills and support independent, active and healthy lifestyles.
- SmartWork: “Smart Age-friendly Living and Working Environment”
SmartWork is building a worker-centric AI system for work ability sustainability, integrating unobtrusive sensing and modelling of the worker state with a suite of novel services for context and worker-aware adaptive work support. The unobtrusive and pervasive monitoring of health, behaviour, cognitive and emotional status of the worker enables the functional and cognitive decline risk assessment. The holistic approach for work ability modelling captures the attitudes and abilities of the ageing worker and enables decision support for personalized interventions for maintenance/improvement of the work ability.
http://www.smartworkproject.eu
- sustAGE: “Smart environments for person-centred sustainable work and well-being”
SustAGE aims to develop a person-centred smart solution tο promote the concept of “sustainable work” for EU industries, in close collaboration with occupational specialists, psychologists and end-users, aiming to support the employment and later retirement of older adults from work, as well as well-being, wellness at work, and productivity of aging employees through three main dimensions: 1) Occupational Safety & Health – is directed toward improving occupational safety and health via risk assessment and prevention strategies based on workplace and person-centred health surveillance monitoring; 2) Personalized Recommendations – aims to promote the wellbeing of employees via personalized recommendations for physical and MH improvement; and 3) Workforce productivity – supports decision-making related to task/job role modifications and aims to optimize overall workforce productivity by assessing the abilities of individual persons (e.g., physical, mental, social) in relation to work demands and risks.
- WorkingAge: “Smart Working environments for all Ages”
WorkingAge implemented a user-centred approach studying the profile of the >45 (years old) workers and the working place requirements in three different working environments (Office, Teleworking and Manufacturing). The project uses innovative Human-Computer-Interaction (HCI) methods to measure the user emotional/cognitive/health state and create communication paths to promote healthy habits of users. An integrated digital solution, the WorkingAge Of Well-being (WAOW) Tool, is oriented to provide friendly interventions that will lead to healthy ageing inside and outside the working environment. WorkingAge will test and validate an integrated solution that learns the user’s behaviour, health data and preferences, and through continuous data collection and analysis of the natural interaction with the user. The WAOW Tool was co-designed to assist workers in their everyday routine in the form of reminders, risk avoidance and recommendations creating a modular and scalable product to empower both companies and employees, easing their professional lives by attenuating the impact of ageing and improving their autonomy, work conditions, health and well-being.
All these projects can play a great role in providing solutions, not only during the emergency states but also in the long-term recovery during which some changes and impacts generated are expected to be maintained as the increasing in teleworking acceptance and implementation, and not only for the office workers but also for the more traditional industries.
