The “ageing population of EU” is a broad and ill-defined segment of the population. The issues appear to be deteriorating health conditions of the 75+ aged citizens and how a modern society should cope with them, i.e. the aim and the vision is to neutralize and/or compensate for the effects of deteriorating health. The reality is that this should be carried out with cost-effective, tax-funded programs. As the proportion of ageing citizens is growing in most EU countries – relatively seen fastest in Germany, Finland and Italy – there is growing political pressure to find trade-offs between the costs of the care programs and the substance (read: quality) of the programs as the tax-paying part of the population simply cannot afford the programs from the year 2030 onwards.

Thus we need to find another way. The first step is to focus on pro-active prevention, i.e. to find measures that will reduce the growth of 75+ citizens that will need the health and social care support of the society; we will put focus on the age group called young elderly – the age group 60-75 years – and develop programs that will keep them healthy, active and independent when they reach the 75+ age group. The second step is to develop tools that can be used as interventions that will implement the programs – applications for mobile smartphones are becoming general purpose instruments and will be even more so by the year 2020 (the mobile connection subscriptions are more than 100% of the population in most EU countries; the proportion of smart phones have passed 60% in several EU countries). The third step is to get ecosystems in place that will maintain and further develop the ICT-based tools that will support the programs for the young elderly.

The young elderly age group represents 18-23 % of the population in most EU countries; this is a large segment of the population that according to recent statistical estimates will be about 97 million EU citizens by 2020. The age interval [60-75] is, of course, not cast in concrete, the effects of age are individual and the ageing process is different for different individuals, in different cultures and in different countries.

We have in Finland for the last few years been working on digital wellness services running on omnivore platforms using mobile smartphones with back-end support developed as cloud services. The ICT environment will offer wellness services that are user and context adaptive (i.e. will offer support that adapts to the cognitive abilities and the wellness history of the user and to the wellness routines that the user has or wants to develop). The services are made adaptive with data fusion and knowledge mobilisation methods developed in the D2I (SHOK) program, a national research and development program for industry and university cooperation. The cloud services and the omnivore platforms are configured to give real-time support in a big data environment, i.e. they will scale up to support first thousands of users, then tens or hundreds of thousand users. There is no doubt that the technology and the digital wellness services will find use and markets also elsewhere in the EU, and then as a global industry based on EU standards.