A common awareness and knowledge platform for studying and enabling independent living – CAPSIL

The population of the world is growing older, and the balance of old to young is shifting so that by 2050 over 30% of the population is expected to be over 60 years old, with particularly high ratios of old to young in the EU, USA and Japan. CAPSIL is an FP7 Coordinating Support Action that incorporates 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. CAPSIL has two fundamental goals:

1. To carry out an analysis of the state of the art with regards to technology, healthcare and public policy in the EU, US and Japan for enabling independent living for older adults. Based on this analysis, develop a detailed roadmap for EU research to achieve
effective and sustainable solutions for independent living
2. To support aging research by proposing procedures to incorporate all of these diverse solutions into WiKi entries (CAPSIL WiKi). It is our hope that these CAPSIL WiKi’s 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.

In this paper we will summarise the principal findings of the CAPSIL Roadmap and present an overview of the main research gaps and recommendations for policy and research development. Finally, we will introduce the CAPSIL WiKi infrastructure.