The European population is ageing and more people live into old age. This also means that there is an increase of age-related diseases such as dementia, placing higher levels of demand on caring services. People that suffer from dementia are excluded from social productivity, are at high risk of social exclusion and have a high demand for care. At the same time, there is an increasing lack of professionals in elderly care [2016, Eurostat]. Governmental authorities across Europe recognize this trend and promised more investments in the domain of elderly care. However, students do not consider the elderly sector as a fulfilling career option, leaving a gap between supply and demand for the care of the elderly. The iConnect project aimed to motivate students to make elderly care a potential and viable option for their study and future career, in parallel to the social inclusion of older people with dementia, by bringing them together in an intergenerational creative approach. We aimed to improve the knowledge and skills of students, the future care professionals, with our innovative creative learning program combining elements like music, art, play and drama. This way students, but also other stakeholders involved, will be equipped to contribute to the goals of dementia friendly environments. Through our project students gained new knowledge and skills related to communication, empathy and creativity, into practice while they make contact with people with dementia. People with dementia felt recognized and reinforced in their identity which enhanced the quality of life.The project selected a number of stakeholders as participants for activities and the output, being students and educators from Higher Education Institutes (HEI), care organisations and care professionals, specialised in dementia care, older people with dementia and their family and/or care givers and policy makers.Throughout the project we delivered 4 intellectual outputs; the Needs Specification Report (a research on current practices related to the use of creative elements and the needs of all involved stakeholders for the implementation of a inclusive dementia care), an innovative Module with learning and teaching material for educators and students, a Blended Learning Platform (based on Moodle structure) and the Transnational Implementation Guidelines, which helps HEI’s and educators across Europe to implement the training, the platform and the teaching material, supporting the impact, replicability and sustainability of iConnect. The guidelines takes up all the findings from the pilot and is complete package, including a teacher and student module, assessment methods, PowerPoints, manuals, index, video instructions and the online blended platform.The iConnect module adapted a co-design and partnership approach amongst students, educators, care providers and older people with dementia in developing all material and the online learning platform. Therefore creation of these 4 end products was supported by activities organised within the context of the project. We organized focus sessions, held interviews and organised an international Learning, Teaching and Training Activity (LTTA), which was a peer-to-peer training in which the participants shared skills and competences. Through the LTTA we trained the teachers and staff who would work with students in the pilot later in this project. The module was tested during this pilot of this project with students participating from four different HEI’s; Hogeschool Utrecht (HU, Netherlands), LAB University of Applied Sciences (LAB, Finland), University of Ioannina (UoI, formerly named TEI, Greece) and Udine University (UNIUD, Italy). Throughout the project each partner organised activities such as presentations, workshops and webinars in which the output was disseminated, tested or discussed. From all these activities given feedback was used to optimise the final outputs.At least 1000 stakeholders were reached through dissemination activities with an overall positive response. For the participating stakeholders the direct impact was enriching the awareness, knowledge, skills and attitudes. Especially in presentations, workshops and webinars participants vocalised their interest and accomplished awareness on the subject, which resulted in an increased willingness among educators to include the module within curricula. The module was used in HEI partners during the pilot and is now integrated in the curriculum of all partner HEI’s for the year(s) to come, sometimes even with a elaboration of the module. Participating students developed a compassionate and empathetic attitude to improve caring towards older people with dementia. Teachers felt empowered and equipped they can now transfer this new knowledge and skills on to the students. With older adults with dementia who participated in the pilot a decrease in the aggressive behaviour of the older adults was seen.

The ehcoBUTLER Idea: Nowadays, it is a fact that Europe is ageing. A common characteristic of elders is the frequent occurrence of either physical or mild cognitive impairments. This situation brings new challenges in how to improve the independence and quality of life of elderly people and promote their good health in different ways. The ehcoBUTLER project addresses this challenge by developing an ICT technological platform with both leisure and care apps. The main objective of ehcoBUTLER is to demonstrate the socio-economic benefits from the deployment of several innovative and user led ICT pilot projects based on different business models in order to be able to translate promising results into scalable practice across Europe. How the objectives will be achieved: The ehcoBUTLER Consortium is composed by a multidisciplinary combination of specialist partners on their areas and responsibilities, in order to satisfy the requirements emerging from the EU Call and the particular PHC-20 topic. With this consortium we expect to contribute to break the technological barrier that exists nowadays between the elderly and the ICTs, encouraging the e-Inclusion, to facilitate psychological and cognitive techniques and support procedures, both for the elderly people and for the informal and formal caregivers, to develop an interoperable and open ICT platform particularly designed and adapted to elderly people, to demonstrate the ROI from several four business models based on the deployment of this ICT platform and to generate an ecosystem for apps provider that will allow end users to integrate all the leisure and care related activities in just one platform. To ensure that the platform can be scaled to an operational deployment in the European Market we will deploy ehcoBUTLER in 5 countries and 7 pilot sites to reach the higher number of users and to test the suitability of ehcoBUTLER in different but related business cases.

In the project BEING ME we aimed to support the social inclusion of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender (LGBT) older people who use care and wellbeing services. As the population of Europe is ageing, more and more older people are in need of care and support. This will include older LGBT people as well, who often need more professional care and support as many do not have children. Research has demonstrated that older LGBT people experience social exclusion while interacting with care providers and that their life stories and relationships are overlooked and undervalued [NOF 2014, Higgins et al 2011, Almack et al 2010]. In some cases they experience direct discrimination within health and social care environments. Current curricula in educational institutions pay little or no attention to sexual and gender diversity among older people [Hafford-Letchfield 2010]. Consequently health and social care workers go on to neglect the importance of sexual identity, sexual orientation, sexual health and gender in their assessment and care [Cocker and Hafford-Letchfield, 2010]. Therefore, to raise awareness and acceptation of LGBT older people, it is important to include sexual and gender diversity in the education of our future health and social care staff. This project aimed to promote and support the social inclusion of LGBT older people in receipt of care through positive interaction with educational institutions that prepare future professionals to work with older people. We aimed to improve the knowledge and competencies of future care professionals. By enhancing skills, knowledge and competencies, practitioners will be in a position to develop a culture of support, openness and respect for LGBT identities which is essential to LGBT older people's inclusiveness in care environments. The project selected a number of stakeholders as participants for activities and the output, being students and educators from both Vocational Education Institutes (VET) and Higher Education Institutes (HEI), LGBT older people, experts and researchers on main themes of (health) care and LGBT, policy makers and care professionals.In the project we delivered four intellectual outputs including an elaborate Research Report consisting of a literature review (academic paper), four country reports and a methodology and template for country reports, a Best Practice Report, a Toolkit and an evaluation report. The creation of these four end products were supported by activities organised by the project. We organized two international World Café Session and one international Learning, Teaching and Training Activity in which different types of stakeholders tested and reviewed the output and gave feedback through questionnaires and interactive feedback sessions. Throughout the project each partner organised smaller (inter)national activities such as lectures, training or (poster) presentations, in which the output was disseminated, tested or already implemented in teaching. From all these activities given feedback is used to optimise the final outputs. The final results of the project, including the research reports, the Best Practice Report and the toolbox are primarily targeted on vocational education, taking place at secondary, post-secondary level (the Netherlands), at higher (tertiary) education (Slovenia) and at higher education (United Kingdom and Ireland). This focus on VET ensured that we reached those students who will be working directly with older people. The impact of the end products can be observed clearly, even in this early stage. At least 900 persons were reached through several different dissemination activities with an overall positive response. The project raised the awareness on inclusive care for older LGBT people among health and social care practitioners, students and educators. Especially in various (inter)national presentations and workshops given over the project’s duration participants vocalised their interest and accomplished awareness on the subject. This resulted in an increased willingness among educators to include older LGBT issues within curricula. In a final evaluation amongst 39 stakeholders after the launch of the toolkit the average of the grade they gave the toolbox is 8,5 and 95% would use the toolbox in their work or studies All outputs are already used in the institutions of each partner during the project and the final product will be a permanent part of the curriculum with each education partner and a platform of 140 VET schools in the Netherlands. There will be a bigger focus on inclusive care for LGBT which will result in more students (and future care professionals) having more knowledge and skills concerning inclusiveness in care environments. Amongst other stakeholders such as LGBT experts and care organisations, there is a great interest and awareness for the topic of inclusive care for LGBT older people.

Pharaon’s overall objective is to make a reality smart and active living for Europe’s ageing population by creating a set of integrated and highly customizable interoperable open platforms with advanced services, devices, and tools including IoT, artificial intelligence, robotics, cloud computing, smart wearables, big data, and intelligent analytics. Platform interoperability will be implemented within Pharaon ecosystems and platforms, as well as other standardised platforms within health and other domains (energy, transport and smart cities). Pharaon will consider relevant standards and will contribute to them with the help of the two standardisation bodies of the consortium. Data privacy, cybersecurity, interoperability and openness will be key design principles to pursue through the requirements generated by Pharaon experts. Pharaon 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. Pharaon will evolve based on the user feedback and the results from a MAFEIP framework that will be implemented for impact assessment. Both inputs will be used to find innovative solutions through two “open calls”: (1) single solutions, and (2) solutions to be demonstrated in small-scale pilots. Pharaon’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 Pharaon.