Ageing & Well-being
Health, care and welfare in an ageing Europe.
About this hub
Based at Université Côte d’Azur in Nice (France).
It deals with topics such as “Ageing in the city”, “Silver economy”, “Environmental impacts on Ageing and Well-being” and “Understanding the process of ageing”.
Through the Innovation Hub, Université Côte d’Azur wishes to strengthen and promote innovative disciplinary, inter-, and transdisciplinary research to better understand and explain the biological process of ageing and its implications.
Scope
Ageing and Well-being must encompass a continuum between formal science, natural science and social and human science to address the following scope:
- Health Promotion
- Components of Wellbeing
- Prevention
- From molecules to organs
- Pathological Ageing
At a transversal level, the Innovation Hub will also address:
- Acceptability
- Health Data
- Cohorts (monitoring, epidemiology, demography)
Description
Targeted Challenges
The demographic transition is a major challenge that makes it essential to address mechanisms of ageing and social, political and economic sustainability. Ageing is linked to increased vulnerability to diseases that lead to functional decline, loss of autonomy and health care system overload. As a result, while life expectancy has increased by 5 years over the last 20 years, the increase in healthy life expectancy has been very slow and has stagnated at 64 years in Europe. Beyond the essential health issues, the associated economic and budgetary impact is considerable, with dependency-related spending accounting for 1.7% of GDP according to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and up to 1.9% in France.
Solutions
Through the Innovation Hub, Université Côte d’Azur wishes to strengthen and promote innovative disciplinary, inter-, and transdisciplinary research to better understand and explain the biological process of ageing and its implications.
Furthermore, being healthy is defined as a state of complete physical, mental, and social wellbeing and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity. This implies finding solutions to promote health, prevent diseases and help individuals live healthier lifestyles. This will only be possible through the development of sustainable connections between researchers, citizens, companies, and local authorities and once more by placing people at the centre of the approach.
Finally, in the context of abundant multisource health data and the development of simulation and artificial intelligence (AI), it is also important to develop the ethical and sustainable interaction of citizens with AI-based algorithms that support healthy living.
The Innovation Hub is installed in a 750m2 building that belongs to the municipality located 50 metres from the Hospital University and from
some of our research units dedicated to health. In this building you have 36 rooms dedicated to: office space, 4 start-ups, conference room to organise events such as Ulysseus workshops and Ulysseus brokerage sessions, a learning lab, and a living lab.
Pilots & Academic Offer
The Living Lab (LL). The LL allows for experimentation in an environment that links citizens, patients (users of the health system in general) with primary care actors (GPs, Physiotherapists, Nurses), researchers (in health, biomaterials, computer science and mathematics, social and educational sciences in particular), institutions (Regional Health Agency, Region, Department, Metropolis, etc.), companies and non-profit facilitators.
The Living Lab is supported by a common warehouse that collects data from health professionals, environmental data, and patient feedback. Importantly, this data warehouse accommodates data from scientific projects (including participatory science) other than health data, such as biological and specific environmental data covered by the other existing platforms. This stored data must serve for reproducibility studies but also for cross-referencing with health or environmental data from other projects.
Research pilots. The Innovation Hub launched a call for proposals for the recruitment of one-year post-Doc to support emerging collaboration on the topic of Ageing and Wellbeing at the level of Ulysseus.
Recent activities
Latest publications
- Ageing & Wellbeing Extended Abstracts from “COMPASS Conference: Transferable Skills for Research & Innovation” (Helsinki, October 2023). View full list of publications on this topic.