Written by: Lena Brandl
More than 40 parallel workshops, 30 poster presentations, and 50 exhibitors from industry, science, and communities dedicated to making healthy ageing possible gave rise to the Ageing Well Week 2022 in Gdańsk, Poland. Gdańsk is a buzzling city with a rich history, including its key role in the solidarity and oppositionist movements. It has therefore only been natural for the city to host the Ageing Well Week 2022, according to the city’s mayor, Aleksandra Dulkiewicz. The challenges that a rapidly ageing world population poses can only be met by a unified and solidary world community.
The next step to making technology for healthy ageing matter
After 14 years of practice-oriented research about health technologies for the increasingly ageing world population, the most important topic of this final edition of the Ageing Well Week was how the community can accomplish the transition of health technologies to the market. Put differently, how can we ensure that the repertoire of evidence-based health technologies gets into the hands of those to whom we dedicated our efforts: the ageing population?
Since this is a question RRD cares about deeply, we joined the event and the ongoing discussions about enabling ageing well. RRD presented two posters about our work in the AAL project LEAVES (Project No. AAL-2019-6-168-CP). Within the LEAVES project, together with 8 consortium partners, RRD has developed an online grief intervention to support older adults in processing the loss of their spouse:
- The first poster, by Stephanie Jansen-Kosterink, demonstrated the preliminary results about technology acceptance and potential health effects of the LEAVES service.
- The second poster, by Lena Brandl, discussed older adults’ use and appreciation of a monitoring system to guide users of LEAVES to offline support (if their situation deteriorates while working with the online grief service).
Our presented work was met with curiosity and praise for giving attention to a common, yet unfortunately, largely unrecognized aspect of healthy ageing: processing the loss of loved ones.
Do you want to take a look at our work presented at the Ageing Well Week 2022? You can find the poster about technology acceptance and potential health effects (preliminary results) of LEAVES here and the poster about older adults’ use and appreciation of a monitoring system here.
Do you have thoughts or ideas about how the health technology community can achieve their goals towards solving the challenges of the ageing world population through digital health solutions? We are happy to discuss, exchange ideas and collaborate to bring healthy ageing within everyone’s grasp!
