Last week, the European Commission and Japan launched their cooperation on Smart Ageing as part of the Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation action scheme.

The Smart Healthy Age-Friendly Environments (SHAFE) network released its Position Paper on recommendations aiming to promote healthier environments for all citizens and make environments accessible, sustainable and reachable for all, with the support of ICT. Based on the desire to implement SHAFE across Europe, a concept was created in 2017 to foster happier and healthier people in all communities, leading to the SHAFE network's launch in 2018 as a thematic network to draw policy makers attention to the need of better alignment between health and social care.

With the outbreak and rapid spread of COVID-19 in the world, the importance of availability and exchange of data to better predict and cure diseases has become even more evident than before.

The local health authority Benevento (IT), Falkiewicz hospital (PL), integral health consortium Barcelona and Santander city council (ES) invite interested bidders to participate in the open market consultation for their upcoming E-CARE pre-commercial procurement. Objective is to develop disruptive digital solutions for the prevention and comprehensive management of frailty to encourage independent living, wellbeing and to relieve health and care services budget pressure. Aim is to achieve impact on both physical and the psychosocial factors, especially in elderly that feel lonely or isolated.

The new Horizon2020 project eCare aims to deliver digital solutions for the management of frailty to encourage elderly people to live independently.

The UK department of health and social care is preparing a new PCP to improve informal (unpaid) care. The focus is on finding innovative models to ensure that carers are: better recognised and connected, better able to juggle working and caring, and better able to look after their own health and wellbeing.

What have the best brains of Europe come up with to improve health, wellbeing and ageing with the help of Information and Communication Technology (ICT)? This report offers an overview of the most current European funded projects in this field.

7 out of 10 hospital beds across Europe are occupied by people with chronic long term conditions. By integrating our health and social welfare systems, the EU funded project CONNECARE has the ambition to co-design, develop, deploy and evaluate a novel smart, adaptive integrated care system for chronic care management.