Active and Healthy Living in the Digital World

Manuscript submission is now open for a new Open Access article collection on “Quality of Life Improvement: Smart Approaches for the Working and Aging Populations” in collaboration with Frontiers in Public Health (Impact Factor of 6.461 and CiteScore of 4.0). On behalf of the editorial team, we would like to include a paper from you in this collection - we welcome articles such as Original Research articles, Review articles, Methods, Policies and Practice Reviews, as well as Opinion pieces.

ITGALL is the Living Lab network managed by the Galician Health Cluster (Cluster Saúde de Galicia, CSG) that includes several living labs, which are spread all over the region of Galicia, Spain. The network was established as a result of the European-funded project IN-4-AHA, where living labs were used to test tech/digital solutions in the context of active and healthy aging. The ITGALL network is based on a model that includes research, clinical excellence, digital transformation, and technological development to test innovative solutions across multiple sectors.

To better understand the implications of population ageing for health financing and to identify policy options, the European Observatory, together with the WHO Kobe Centre, developed the Population Ageing financial Sustainability gap for Health systems (or alternatively, the PASH) Simulator tool. The PASH Simulator tool allows a user to see how both health expenditures and health revenues are expected to change through the end of the century due to changes in population age-structure across a wide range of countries.

This Research Topic focuses on both strengths and weaknesses of social innovation, technological innovation, and health innovation that are increasingly recognized as crucial concepts related to the formulation of responses to the social, health, and environmental challenges. Goals of this Research Topic: (1) to identify and share the best recent practices and innovations related to social, environmental and health policies; (2) to debate on relevant governance modes, management tools as well as evaluation and impact assessment techniques; (3) to discuss dilemmas in the fields of management, financing, designing, implementing, testing, and maintaining the sustainability of innovative models of delivering social, health and care services; and (4) to recognize and analyze social, technological and health innovation that has emerged or has been scaled-up to respond to crisis situations, for example, a pandemic of the COVID-19 coronavirus disease.

In this position paper, we have used Alan Cooper’s persona technique to illustrate the utility of audio- and video-based AAL technologies. Therefore, two primary examples of potential audio- and video-based AAL users, Anna and Irakli, serve as reference points for describing salient ethical, legal and social challenges related to use of AAL. These challenges are presented on three levels: individual, societal, and regulatory. For each challenge, a set of policy recommendations is suggested.

One of the outcomes of the Horizon 2020 project Innovation Networks for Scaling Active and Healthy Ageing (IN-4-AHA) is an innovation scale-up model that is validated by stakeholders and complemented by implementation roadmap. You can find it now in Futurium Library and please check out also an online scale up model, a tool for innovators.