AGE takes part in new EU project to prevent frailty in old age

The FrailSafe project was launched on 1st January 2016 and gathers partners from Greece, Spain, Italy, Belgium, France and Cyprus. The aim is ambitious: preventing frailty by developing a set of measures and tools, together with recommendations to reduce its onset. To achieve these objectives, FrailSafe will combine state of the art technologies and data mining techniques with high-level expertise in the field of health and ageing. The project, funded by the European Research programme Horizon 2020, will last three years.

Ageing population is increasing worldwide to reach an estimated two billion people aged over 65 years by 2050. While the increasing life expectancy is a positive outcome due to long-lasting health and social improvements, there is still much to do to improve the Healthy life years indicator i.e. the number of years without disability.

Frailty is a syndrome characterized by diminished strength, endurance, and reduced physiologic function that increases an individual’s vulnerability for developing increased dependency, and/or death. Frailty is also related to multiple pathologies: weight loss, and/or fatigue, weakness, low activity, slow motor performance, and balance and gait abnormalities. Frailty together with functional decline and disability are common conditions in older people, and are increasing with ageing. However, frailty is a dynamic and not an irreversible process; it seems preventable, may be delayed, or reversed.

FrailSafe, an international partnership of nine partners from six countries, decided to join forces to find solutions to prevent and/or delay the onset of frailty. FrailSafe aims to:

  • better understand frailty and its relation to other health conditions;
  • identify quantitative and qualitative measures of frailty through advanced data mining approaches and use them to predict short and long-term outcome and risk of frailty;
  • develop real life sensing and an intervention platform;
  • provide a digital patient model of frailty sensitive to several dynamic parameters, including physiological, behavioural and contextual;
  • create “prevent-frailty” evidence-based recommendations for older persons;
  • strengthen the motor, cognitive, and other “anti-frailty” activities through the delivery of personalised treatment programmes, monitoring alerts, guidance and education;
  • to achieve a safe, unobtrusive and acceptable system for the ageing population while reducing the cost of health care systems.

In the project, AGE is leading the dissemination activities, and will support the project partners in designing products and services which are relevant for older persons.

The partners met on 19-20th January in Patras to start planning the implementation. Activities already started to set up the basis of the interventions and a project website is under construction.

For more information, contact Maude Luherne maude.luherne@age-platform.eu

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