Smart, personalized and adaptive ICT solutions for active, healthy and productive ageing with enhanced workability

Along with population ageing comes the increasingly intensified phenomenon of a shrinking and ageing workforce. Novel solutions are needed so as to help ageing workers maintain workability and productivity, along with a balance between work and personal life, which supports them into good quality of life, active and healthy ageing. In this line, the “Ageing@work” project, initiated by the European Union, develops a novel ICT-based, personalized system to support ageing workers (aged 50+) into designing fit for purpose work environments and managing flexibly their evolving needs. On top of personalized, dynamically adapted worker and workplace models, computational intelligence will assess user specificities and needs i.r.t. work conditions, both in terms of ergonomics, health and safety issues and task assignments. Recommendations will then be provided both to the worker and company, under strict privacy restrictions, on how the working conditions must adapt. The worker models will be populated by unobtrusive worker sensing, both at work, at home and on the move. To foster workability and productivity, personalized, intuitive, age-friendly productivity, co-design enhancement tools will be developed, including ones for AR/VR-based context-awareness and telepresence, lifelong learning and knowledge sharing. On top of these, a novel Ambient Virtual Coach (AVC) will encompass an empathic mirroring avatar for subtle notifications provision, an adaptive Visual Analytics - based personal dashboard, and a reward-based motivation system targeting positive and balanced worker behavior at work and personal life, towards a novel paradigm of ambient support into workability and well-being. The integrated system will be developed by user-centered design and will be evaluated at two pilot sites, related to core Industry 4.0 processes of mining and machines production.