I have recently become the UCD PI for an EU Support Action CAPSIL we coordinate. CAPSIL is an ‘International Support of a Common Awareness and Knowledge Platform for Studying and Enabling Independent Living’. Our first kick off meeting is in London on April 10th with follow up meetings in Japan, Boston, Oregon and Ireland.

The aging of society is the single most important aspect of health care in the 21st century. Many intriguing ICT solutions are being developed within the EU, USA, and Japan for helping older people remain independent longer. However, these solutions tend to be fragmented and heterogeneous. The CAPSIL Coordinating Support Action (CSA) team is a strategic international coalition of University and Industrial partners that already have extensive teams developing hardware/software/knowledge solutions to independent living based on user requirements. All partners of CAPSIL are already members of regional and national centres on aging engaged in the process of helping to establish public policy and international standards. This support action is to launch initiatives, coordinated and disseminated by a series of workshops in the US, EU, and Japan (two per year for two years), with three fundamental goals:

* to develop a detailed CAPSIL Roadmap for EU research to achieve effective and sustainable solutions to independent living based on an in-depth analysis of independent living requirements and the ICT scenarios developed or under development in the EU, as well as the US and Japan (societies where the aging of the population are currently on par or exceeding the challenges that will be found within the EU).

* to support aging research by proposing procedures to incorporate all of these diverse solutions into WiKi entries (CAPSIL WiKi). These CAPSILs will enable researchers and the ICT industry to get the information they need to quickly and easily test solutions for prolonging independent living within the many and various heterogeneous communities. Only with this knowledge will the relevance and efficacy of technological solutions be maintained and be empowered with the capability to be adapted for various cultures.

* to use the CAPSIL Roadmap and the CAPSIL Workshops to help policy makers in the US and Japan coordinate research agendas and funding efforts across the three continents.