Synergies

Three projects have been funded under the so called “silver deal call“.  The goal of this call is to create better, more connected, and innovative health and care services for older people—whether they are at home, in the hospital, or in primary care. These services should be built around their physical and mental health needs, helping them stay active, independent, and healthy as they age.

This includes not just medical treatment, but also things like:

• Prevention and rehabilitation
• Tools like smart devices, sensors, social robots, assistive tech, and age-friendly environments
• Fun and helpful tech like serious games
• Health checks and tools to help people monitor their own health

The idea is to design and test new, proven ways of caring for older people, making sure the care is centered around the individual and works well across health and community systems. These approaches should also help people stay physically, mentally, and nutritionally strong—especially those who may have fewer resources or support.

To make this all happen, support will be given to new health solutions designed with and for older adults. This includes:

• Large-scale testing and pilot programs
• Proving cost-effectiveness
• Helping with approval processes
• Sharing success stories and working together across Europe and beyond

The focus is on empowering older adults, improving their health knowledge, and making sure they have equal access to quality care.

The three selected projects are thus aligned with those objectives but with different approaches. They have however important commonalities such as the use of multimodal data, the willingness to develop ethical and explainable AI and the willingness to rely on sound  co-creation approach. Both COMFORTage and STAGE started in January 2024 while a third project SMILE was started a year later. This last project  addresses musculoskeletal non-communicable diseases (MSK-NCDs) and aims to reduce long-term care needs thanks to the support of the chip platform with advanced sensors and actuators designed for continuous monitoring and feedback.

The cluster held a successful common public event in Barcelona in May 2025 with the active participation of the region of Catalunya. This first conference served as a powerful reminder that healthy ageing isn’t just about policies and systems—it’s also about shifting attitudes, sparking dialogue, and building shared spaces for reflection and creativity. The three projects will organise other common events as the projects begin to deliver outputs.

This open cluster gathers no less than 10 EU funded projects which share partial common objectives and challenges. They are covering a large spectrum of clinical conditions. Some projects such as Brainteaser or AI-Mind are already at the end of their cycle while others are beginning their journey. This is thus a very important opportunity to allow a transfer of experience and knowledge between projects. A number of preparatory meetings have taken place to identify the possible areas of collaboration and agree on common on SMART objectives (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-Bound) for each selected topic.  Each project is of course free to select the working areas they want to be part of and accept the responsibility to lead the process. 

The proposed areas of collaboration are covering multimodal data integration, data sharing architecture and connexion with the upcoming European Health Data Space, Federated data sharing services, Ai training and validation, legal and regulatory compliance and joint communication.

After a first successful webinar focusing on experience in data integration by Brainteaser and AI-Mind, this toipic is the first to have been launched with the objective to produce a common papers on strategies pursued and lessons learnt.

The European Brain Council and EHTEL are both acting as secretaries of the working groups.

This cluster is more oriented towards dementia and aims at creating direct bridges between the projects in order to increase impact and consider possible reuse of resources between project. The projects involved are AI-MIND and PREDICTOM. The results of the now terminated RADAR-AD project are also important for this cluster.

Both  AI-MIND and  PREDICTOM have been invited to become active partners in the COMFORTage Community Forum related to the use of AI for dementia and frailty.  While AI-MIND will come to an end in 2026, PREDICTOM has started roughly at the same time than COMFORTage offering more space for synergies.

By screening brain connectivity and dementia risk estimation in people affected by mild cognitive impairment, the AI-Mind project will open the door to extending the ‘dementia-free’ period by offering proper diagnosis and early intervention. AI-Mind has developed two artificial intelligence-based digital tools that will identify dysfunctional brain networks and assess dementia risk. Personalised patient reports are being generated, potentially opening new windows for intervention possibilities.

PREDICTOM will develop an open-source, interoperable and customisable biomarker screening platform, utilizing an existing online resource to save time and money, to generate an evidence base for general population screening for AD and related disorders.

Aside from exchange of knowledge and common dissemination objectives, the cluster will also lead to concrete collaborations such as the sharing of retrospective and prospective data collected by the projects

COMFORTage has also initiated a direct collaboration with the Joint Action JADE HEALTH.

The main goal of JADE Health is to reduce the burden of dementia and other neurological disorders and to improve the quality of treatment for persons with those diseases, by developing new care models which foster awareness raising, healthy aging and early detection, through the participation of 7,500 healthcare professionals, carers, patients, families and caregivers, using evidence-based best practices via 44 pilots implementation in 17 EU countries.

COMFORTage has closely associated JADE HEALTH to the definition of its value proposition for policy makers and has participated in joint webinar exploring strategies to optimise dissemination impact. This also allowed COMFORTage to create links with WHO Regional Office for Europe, Alzheimer Europe and the CARE4elders project.

COMFORTage wants to closely associate JADE Health and other partners to activities targeted at public health and public research, both in the context of the COMFORTage Community forum and  in the drafting of future recommendations related to the use of AI and digital tools to support both prevention and interventions.