Balance and gait deficits are ubiquitous among the older population, and lead to enormous personal, occupational and health care burden. Emerging pharmacological and non-pharmacological interventions to date have only small to moderate effects on these deficits. This is likely due to remaining fundamental questions on underlying mechanisms and treatment. The present project Keep Control consists of a rare EU-wide combination of experts from clinical, biomechanic and neuroscience research, along with experts from the industry, who all aim at gaining a better understanding and treatment of balance and gait deficits in older adults. We aim to scrutinize aspects such as: (1) comparability of balance and gait assessment in the clinic and the home environment, (2) gait and balance deficits as prodromal markers of neurodegeneration, and as markers to differentiate between Parkinsonian syndromes, (3) association between freezing of gait and balance, and (iv) gait and balance deficits in patients with sarcopenia. Tools such as sophisticated lab-based gait and balance assessment devices, perturbation treadmill, wearable devices, electrophysiology and blood and tissue investigations will be implemented. We will further employ promising therapeutic strategies for specific gait and balance deficits in older adults, including both pharmacologic and non-pharmacologic strategies. An entire work package will be dedicated to a novel harmonization and integration approach across the whole network: It will (i) harmonize assessment protocols based on the WHO definition of health and disability, to pave the way for an exhaustive meta-analysis of all data collected, and (ii) foster the active involvement of all study participants by implementation of a participant-controlled medical record. In summary, Keep control will cover the entire range of expertise necessary and utilize cutting edge technology to educate fellows in the area of gait and balance deficits in older adults.

The global sports industry is diverse, fragmented and rapidly changing, it is also a large industry and an early adopter. It comprises numerous different sectors and therefor relies on innovation and technology that spans many disciplines. This diverse range of technology disciplines however slows down the innovation process. Cross-sectoral cooperation could accelerate the entrepreneurial behaviour and improve the innovation climate. Effective knowledge transfer however is inhibited by differences in culture and language between industry and academia. This also hampers academic staff to educate students with appropriate transversal skills. The rapid changes in the sports industry are not always mirrored in the relatively static provision of sports engineering education. The specific problems/challenges that this project will address are therefor as follows;1. How to provide the sports industry with appropriate life-long learning solutions?2. How to enable cross-sectoral cooperation in the sports industry?3. How to improve the fit between current HEI curricula and the sports industry?4. How to reduce the cultural barriers between HEIs and sports industry?The project A4SEE will deliver three significant project interventions to address these challenges.1. Creation and delivery of Joint Learning Activities (Industry Collaboration Experience, Special Topics Week and Innovation Marketplace)2. Creation and delivery of Open Online Courses (Sports Engineering Basic, Advanced and Professional Courses)3. Creation and delivery of Innovation Fellowships on sports innovation and emerging technologies. (Academia to Industry, Industry to Academia and Student to Industry)A4SEE Symposia and an on-line platform will be established as dissemination activity. These symposia and the platform will allow students and sports industry employers to connect by means of: Company Presentations, (Technology) Demonstration Market and Academic Insights.

The PACE research and training programme sits at the interface between basic science, technology and clinics, in order to unveil how humans control and adapt their movements in complex, naturalistic environments. Such a research agenda has major consequences for understanding how these movements are impacted by specific brain insults and how these impairments can be compensated for via new rehabilitation methods. Improving rehabilitation programmes for sensory and motor disabilities across the lifespan is a major societal challenge in western countries and many obstacles need to be overcome. To provide but one example, with regard to eye-hand coordination of upper limb movement remaining abilities are rarely assessed in stroke patients or sensory-disabled children and this impacts both prognostic estimation and rehabilitation. New technologies, such as robotics or virtual reality, provide an exciting change in perspective to transfer state-of-the-art knowledge from basic research on sensorimotor transformation into the clinical domain. To meet these societal challenges, it is crucial to train a new generation of early-stage researchers in a programme such as PACE where fundamental and applied/clinical research are effectively integrated via collaborative research, doctoral secondments and theoretical courses – in other words, one in which clinicians, neuroscientists, theoreticians and engineers can contribute around a well-defined problem: how humans acquire, lose and recover movement performance. With 8 academic, 1 clinical and 1 private beneficiaries, and 5 partner organizations (4 industrial, 1 in science communication), PACE structures a training and research programme that is both highly interdisciplinary and intersectoral. Our goal is to meet both fundamental and clinical well-identified challenges as well as preparing young scientists for future european research & development in the fields of human movement studies and rehabilitation medicine.