Ageing is a gradual process and there is no definition of when someone becomes an “older worker”, but many physical changes associated with ageing including decline in vision, hearing and psychomotor coordination are estimated to start as early as the age of 50. Furthermore, health chronic conditions prevalence in case of people aged 50+ is very high, with every second person having hypertension and/or some other chronic disease (e.g. high cholesterol, heart disease, mental illness, diabetes, arthritis, back problems, asthma, COPD, etc.), and multimorbidity being very common among people aged 65+ (prevalence rates estimated as high as 65%). It is worth noting that ill health incapacity is a major cause of labour market exit before the age of 60. On the other side, except of work-specific skills and knowledge, other valuable functions and transferable skills improve with age, including strategic thinking, sharp-wittedness, consideration, wisdom, ability to deliberate, ability to rationalise, language skills, and holistic perception, thus overall the longer work experience having the potential to compensate for the decline of some basic cognitive processes (e.g. memory functions) and psychomotor skills if adequately exploited at the workplace.
SmartWork builds a worker-centric AI system for work ability sustainability, integrating unobtrusive sensing and modelling of the worker state with a suite of novel services for context and worker-aware adaptive work support. The project combines the unobtrusive monitoring of health, cognitive and emotional status of the worker, through the deployment of a corresponding sensing infrastructure (IPN mouse, wearables, work-environment sensors), with the a set of AI-enhanced applications, enabling the effective management of everyday tasks, the efficient management of resources and the improved collaboration and interaction between employees and employers. Placing the older employees at its center, the project aims to support their healthy ageing, while maintaining them active and productive at their working environment. This is performed by adopting a holistic approach that considers the attitudes and abilities of the ageing worker and enables decision support for personalized interventions for maintenance of the work ability, towards the creation of an adaptive working environment supports the older office worker with optimized services for on-the-fly work flexibility coordination, seamless transfer of the work environment between different devices and different environments (home, office, on the move), and on-demand personalized training.
SmartWork builds its value proposition on four key objectives (O) found in two major categories, namely: (O1) Worker-Centric AI System for Work Ability Sustainability; (O2) Unobtrusive sensing and modelling of worker state; (O3) Novel SmartWork Services Suite for the Context and Worker-Aware Adaptive Work Support; and (O4) Co-create and evaluate the SmartWork system with the active engagement of the end users in real world settings, with special attention to ethics, privacy and security.
