Project: Platform for Ergonomic and motivating, ict-based Age-friendly woRkpLaces

Acronym PEARL (Reference Number: aal-2013-6-091)
Duration 01/06/2014 - 01/12/2016
Project Topic Recent advances in ICT technologies provide opportunities for deploying age-friendly working environments, on the basis of appropriate structuring of working tasks, ergonomic design of the surrounding environment, systems that facilitate the elderly to manage their everyday task, as well as tools which provide cognitive and emotional support. Despite the proliferation of these technologies and their deployment in occupation spaces, there have been no efforts for systematically combining them towards transforming working environments into agefriendly environments. PEARL’s main goal is to enable the development and deployment of ICT-based ergonomic and motivating age-friendly workspaces, on the basis of a unique blending of leading edge ICT technologies for smart working environments. To this end, the project will research, develop, deploy and validate (in lab and field trials) a programmable platform enabling the integration and customization of ICT technologies for specific occupation environments and tasks. The PEARL platform will comprise ergonomic surface computing technologies, automatic identification infrastructures enabling the ambient configuration of the surrounding environment, project/time management tools, tools for cognitive support, as well as an e-learning platform. These technologies will be initially customized to elderly needs in terms of ergonomics and ease of use. Accordingly, they will be combined and integrated, thereby leading to a multiplicative benefit comparing to the positive impact of each individual technology alone. Overall PEARL will provide a first-of-a-kind platform for the programmable and modular configuration of ICT-enabled age-friendly working spaces, which will be an essential element of EU’s strategy towards prolonging working life. PEARL will not be based on an «all-or-nothing» value proposition. Rather it will offer enterprises the possibility of choosing a deployment configuration that best suits their needs.
Network AAL
Call Call 6 – Supporting occupation in life for older adults

Project partner

Number Name Role Country
Aalborg University Denmark
AIT Austrian Institute of Technology GmbH Austria
Center for Usability Research & Engineering Austria
COMARG – Communication & Marketing Agency Switzerland
empirica Gesellschaft für Kommunikations- und Technologieforschung mbH Germany
RFID specialisten Denmark
Roessingh Research & Development Netherlands
SENSAP Swiss AG Switzerland
Singular Romania Computer application S.R L. Romania