The FrailSafe project aims to delay frailty by developing a set of measures and tools, together with recommendations to reduce its onset. 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. It makes older persons more vulnerable to stressors and has major health care implications, which in turn have an impact on the planning and delivery of health and social services.

Frailty together with functional decline and disability are common conditions among 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 delay the onset of frailty. Partners include: the University of Patras (Greece, coordinator), Brainstorm (Spain), Smartex and Gruppo SIGLA (Italy), CERTH and Hypertech (Greece), INSERM (France), AgeCare (Cyprus) and AGE Platform Europe (Belgium).

Aims of FrailSafe

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