Vitalise (Horizon 2020)

Goal

In recent years, European living labs have invested heavily in techniques and methodologies to involve users in new developments. Trust between researchers and end users in evaluating and exploiting research results is crucial here. Thus, many project-oriented living labs emerged with specific research goals for the duration of a project. However, this does not lead to an optimal use of resources, time and distribution of work and expertise and provides limited exploitation of research results.

The Helsinki Manifesto (Finnish EU Presidency November 2006) recognised Living Labs as important and effective research infrastructures, especially within the field of Health and Welfare, where the needs of citizens (young people, elderly, patients...) are central. Living labs also received more scientific attention in various publications in the last 5 years. Efficiency can be increased if researchers have good access to Living Lab infrastructure, and there are harmonised procedures, common policies for experiments in real life settings, state-of-the-art technology and teams with multidisciplinary expertise.

VITALISE works with concrete use cases in three domains: rehabilitation, transition from hospital to home and smart home technology in home environments.

LiCalab, in collaboration with Mobilab&Care, supervises the living lab activities in the field of rehabilitation and works closely with the partners for the two other use cases.