Links
Research and links
Agelab
MOBI-AGE project is particularly interested in one of the subjects, developed in MIT Agelab, which is ‘Transportation & Livable Communities’:
Transportation is critical to everyday life. More than simply getting from point A to point B, transportation is the key to independence, freedom and meaningful engagement for older people. Sponsored by the US Department of Transportation New England University Transportation Center, the insurance industry, Santos Family Foundation, automobile industry, pharmaceutical manufacturers and selected governments around the world, AgeLab’s research addresses transportation safety, impact of health, wellness and medication use on operator performance, personal transportation choices, future travel demand, the promise and trade-offs of new technologies in the automobile, vehicle services and design, and mobility alternatives in the context of livable communities across ages in the United States and around the world.
OTHER PROJECTS
Porto4Ageing
The Porto4Ageing consortium brings together over 90 organisations, the large majority of them being established within the Porto Metropolitan Area, within the Norte Region of Portugal. The partnership is built upon the quadruple helix approach – it involves different stakeholders (regional governments and health and care providers, academia and research, industry and civil society) that are in good position to drive structural changes far beyond the scope any one organization could achieve on its own and to innovate and experiment in real world settings. Despite the different backgrounds, goals and actions, Porto4Ageing is built upon a shared vision and common targets, where each organisation contributes actively in a specific way to the overall goal of responding better to the citizens’ needs, specifically in matters related to active and health ageing in the Porto Region.
By involving a broad number of institutions, the Porto4Ageing alliance is committed to promoting local convergence and improving the health innovation ecosystem, while reducing and overcoming existing bottlenecks. It will do so by promotiong joint work for high impact, thus bridging the gap between public and private actions and instruments and, ultimately, facilitating knowledge exchanges and results’ scaling up.
Other Projects
SENIORS
European countries face great challenges because the demographic structure in the EU is changing rapidly, due to reducing birth rates and increasing life expectancies. In 2012, 17% of Europeans were aged 65 and older and in 2020 this will rise to 28%. Meanwhile, the mobility needs of the elderly are also changing. Maintaining a driver’s licence is an important issue of independence today, both for males and females. Also technological developments like the introduction of e-bikes enables access to other means of transport.
These demographic and behavioural changes are of growing concern to mobility and road safety. While accident data show a decreasing number of fatalities and serious injuries on EU roads, recent data from the ERSO show an increasing proportion of elderly in the fatality statistics. This trend is a serious threat to the achievements of recent decades and poses a challenge that must be addressed to meet goals set for further reduction of road fatalities. Furthermore, there is an increasing rate of obesity in EU populations, which introduces changes in injury patterns and risks. The SENIORS project focuses on the protection of elderly and obese road users also by transferring nowadays younger generations’ safety standards.
Other Projects
SHARE
The Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe (SHARE) is a multidisciplinary and cross-national panel database of micro data on health, socio-economic status and social and family networks of more than 120,000 individuals aged 50 or older (more than 297,000 interviews). SHARE covers 27 European countries and Israel.
SHARE responds to a Communication by the European Commission calling to “examine the possibility of establishing, in co-operation with Member States, a European Longitudinal Ageing Survey” (Council Document 6997/01). SHARE has become a major pillar of the European Research Area, selected as one of the projects to be implemented in the European Strategy Forum on Research Infrastructures in 2006 and given a new legal status as the first ever European Research Infrastructure Consortium (SHARE-ERIC) in March 2011.
