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AAL Award 2014 goes to CONFIDENCE

2014-09-15

More and more people are suffering from dementia. Everyday life and independent living become more and more challenging with the progressive disease. Since 2012, an international research team is working on an assistance system that will help patients to stay mobile and active. The research project “CONFIDENCE” was now awarded as the most promising European AAL projectat at the international AAL Forum 2014 in Bucharest (Romania).

The AAL Award recognizes the most promising project of the Ambient Assisted Living Joint Programme that demonstrates great promise in terms of innovation, human-centric approaches to development and market potential.For the first time, the programme decided to institute two separated prizes. The institutional prize, resulting from the judgement of the panel, and the public prize, resulting from the vote of the public. Both prizes were awared to CONFIDENCE.

The competition was a three months process along a three steps selection, which was participated by 13 projects of the AAL Joint Programme. For the first time the main award was worth a financial prize of € 5000, which is intended to help the winner to bring the project to go to market.

Support for People with dementia and their family members

The project Confidence, which is led by the Salzburg Research Institute in Austria won the competition. It aim is to develop a community-based mobility safeguarding assistance service for people suffering from mild to moderate dementia. Confidence combines “assistive technologies” with “personal help”. The Confidence service is built around a “virtual companion” providing different levels of assistance, depending on the situational needs of the patient and the degree of orientation loss. The service is supplemented with personal help from family members, staff of home care agencies and/or trusted volunteers.

Research project CONFIDENCE

The European research project „CONFIDENCE“ is funded within the Ambient Assisted Living Joint Program by the EU, and by the Austrian Federal Ministry for Transport, Innovation and Technology (BMVIT). Project Partners are: Salzburg Research Forschungsgesellschaft (Co-ordinator), Hilfswerk Salzburg (Austria), ILOGS mobile software GmbH (Austria), Raiffeisenlandesbank Kärnten, Rechenzentrum und Revisionsverband reg. Gen.m.b.H. (Austria), iHomeLab, Hochschule Luzern (Switzerland), Presence displays bv. (The Nederlands), Ralph Eichenberg Szenografie Cinematografie, Fotografie (Switzerland), terzStiftung (Switzerland), Ana Aslan International Foundation (Romania) und Swisscom Participations Ltd (Switzerland).
http://www.confidence4you.eu/