The COMFORTage Training Programme is a core initiative designed to address the complex challenges of frailty and dementia in ageing populations through preventive, person-centred strategies. It empowers older adults, informal caregivers, and healthcare professionals to acquire the knowledge, skills, and confidence needed to engage with self-management approaches and digital health technologies that support the management of health risks and everyday living challenges.
Developed through a co-creation and co-validation process, the programme actively involves older adults, caregivers, and healthcare professionals, ensuring that it reflects lived experiences, user capabilities, and real-world healthcare contexts. Contributions from clinical experts, social scientists, educators, and developers further reinforce its scientific rigour, practical relevance, and pedagogical integrity. At its core is a comprehensive training curriculum addressing health, psychological, social, and technological aspects of ageing, dementia, and frailty, while offering personalised learning pathways tailored to each user group and individual learner.
Digital Training Programme Platforms: TET and TEM
The delivery of the curriculum is supported by two digital platforms: the Training and Educational Toolkit (TET) and the Training and Educational Marketplace (TEM). TET provides a modular and accessible learning environment featuring thematic content, real-world scenarios, visual resources, and interactive self-assessment exercises that promote self-paced learning and confidence in using digital health solutions. TEM complements this with a curated catalogue of digital health applications, enabling users to discover relevant tools, review community evaluations, and apply practical solutions to support prevention, self-care, and caregiver–patient communication.
Accessibility and Inclusiveness
Although not fully open-access, the programme is designed as an online, broadly accessible resource, ensuring low-threshold entry and inclusiveness across diverse European healthcare contexts. The learning experience is modular, flexible, and progressive, allowing individuals to advance at their own pace and according to their level of digital familiarity. With intuitive, visual, multi-lingual, and locally adapted content, it is purposefully designed to be inclusive and accessible to users with different cognitive, linguistic, and educational backgrounds.
**Article written by The Aristotle University of Thessaloniki , a key partner in the COMFORTage project.