Every 3 months COLABORAR publishes a free Newsletter. Every edition features hilighted content from COLABORAR news and events, including research and test activities with users.
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We are happy to announce the launch of our updated email newsletter! This dynamic newsletter aims to bring you the most relevant news regarding our research activities in a practical manner. We hope your experience reading our newsletter will be improved, by giving you more visual content and the option to read more if you want to.
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Good news! We have a new logo and a new website!
Our website was updated, by redesigning some elements, such as fonts, colour schemes, images and sections. We maintained the usual news, network and about us sections. We added information related to services we can provide along with detailed information related to what we do. We want to offer other research centres and companies the possibility of including older adults’ needs in their projects, as well as the possibility of assessing and validating technologies under development with real users. We maintained the area for newsletter subscription and to join the network – you are wellcome, as an older adult volunteer or as a partner institution. We also kept the quotes from the volunteers in the network. To complete the rebrand, we made a new logo, that was already displayed in the COLABORAR Facebook page.
Visit us regularly and keep up to date with our activities in the research centre.
Volunteers from the user network COLABORAR are collaborating with us in a project that aims to disseminate research activities we usually carry at Fraunhofer Portugal AICOS.
We are recording different moments of our work at the research centre: visits to day-care centres, tests at the Living Lab, interviews for qualitative analysis, etc. We are also interviewing participants and technical-directors of partner day-care centres.
We will reveal more details about this soon.
The Porto Canal channel made a news piece about Fraunhofer Portugal AICOS.
The Deus Ex Machina (DEM) project was hilighted. This project focuses on benefits for users in the future by building a technological response to societal challenges. This project comprises sub-projects in diverse fiels: agriculture, nutrition, health, mind and behaviour, activity monitoring, and community tools.
The research within the DEM project is supported by National Funds and counts with partnerships of other six research centres from the northern region of Portugal. The aim of this project is to improve the quality of life of the population through technology.
The user is at the centre of the research. Researchers begin by understanding their needs and the way they perceive technology. Two volunteers from the user network COLABORAR participated in a demo to show a project related to fall prevention. They performed some physical exercises guided by software on TV.
Our thanks to the participants!
You can watch the video here.
Fraunhofer Portugal AICOS‘ researcher António Santos was in the TV programme Mundo Local, for the Portuguese channel Porto Canal.
He explained the project Active@Home, the platform of home-based physical exercise for older adults. Mrs. Cecília Mendonça, user network COLABORAR volunteer, was present in the studio as well, and was interviewed regarding their participation in the tests.
During the news piece, a demo recorded inside our Living Lab was also displayed.
We guess that many people wants to try the exercises of Active@Home.
Following the initial tests of the Active@Home project, we gave a demonstration to a Portuguese news agency and once again we counted on the COLABORAR volunteers.
In this way, the Fraunhofer Portugal AICOS made known this technological project consisting of traditional dance exercises and Tai-Chi, which works on TV, along with some sensors, and therefore allows the elderly to perform strength and balance training at home. António Santos, the researcher responsible for the project, highlights the “playful and entertaining component” of these training program.
COLABORAR was highlighted as well, as journalists wanted to know about this network of about 1000 volunteers, who help to test and validate Fraunhofer’s applications. One of the volunteers who participated in the demonstration session, Mr. Jorge Mendonça, was interviewed and spoke about his experience, saying that he likes to participate because he gets to know important applications, especially in the area of health, and that this project of technology for home gymnastics can be very helpful for seniors.
The news piece appeared in many Portuguese newspapers and we are very proud. You can see them here (Portuguese only):
The Municipality of Porto (Câmara Municipal do Porto) and the University of Porto launched a formal application of the region to the European Reference Site of the Active and Healthy Ageing to the European Commission.
With this purpose, it was created the consortium Porto4Ageing that comprises more than 70 institutions: decision makers/care providers, companies/industries, academia/research organizations and civil society/users. The consortium will be an Excellent Centre on Active and Healthy Ageing and will act as an aggregator by bringing together many institutions and professionals that work in areas related to seniors.
We are very happy that our research centre, Fraunhofer Portugal AICOS, is part of the consortium. We will certainly contribute to the discussion of problems related to older adults and present creative solutions that could be replicated in other regions of Portugal and Europe.
The official ceremony of presentation of the proposal to the European Commission took place on April 11st, in Porto, and many institutions were present.
The video showing our participation in the Technological Fair is now available.
Witness below some fun moments of the event hat welcomed one hundred seniors to try out Fraunhofer AICOS’s applications for tablets, smartphones and TV’s.
The event was organized by Santa Casa da Misericórdia de Lisboa and Fraunhofer Portugal AICOS. It was a great opportunity not only to gather a big number of seniors around new technologies but also to engage in some “techy conversations”.
November 14th is World Diabetes Day. The day was created by the International Diabetes Federation to help increase Diabetes awareness. Diabetes is a disease that affects people worldwide and its complications are blindness, heart attack, kidney failure and limb amputation. Blindness and amputation are consequences of Diabetic Rethinopathy and Diabetic Neuropathy, respectively. Researchers from Fraunhofer Portugal AICOS are developing new solutions to improve the early detection of these Diabetes complications. COLABORAR wants to mark the date by highlighting those projects:
You can see a news piece by SIC Notícias on these two Fraunhofer Portugal AICOS’s projects below (in Portuguese).