Sandra Degelsegger

Sandra uses her background in cultural- and social anthropology, physiotherapy and European public health to represent older persons in different fora. As a project officer at AGE Platform Europe, Sandra helps researchers, technologists and game developers to understand the perspective of older adults and to meet their needs and preferences.

The projects she is in charge of fall in the areas of the European Silver Economy, Assistive Technologies, Integrated Care, and Healthy Ageing. Some projects have been developing games to better assess and prevent frailty (the EU FrailSafe project) and help older persons living with Parkinson’s sustain their quality of life (the i-PROGNOSIS project).

AGE Platform Europe (AGE) is the European civil society organisation representing the voice of older people at EU level. AGE is a network of non-profit organisations of and for people aged 50+ located in 26 different EU Member States and aims at combatting ageism, improving social rights and participation of older people in society, promoting active and healthy ageing, and at fostering an age-friendly environment.

PRESENTATION 2018

Healthy Ageing through games
In the context of a growing European Silver Economy, European health policies currently move from a curative to a more preventive approach and towards personalised medicine. This allows the Game Industry to contribute to this economic growth. As a partner of several European Commission funded projects, such as i-PROGNOSIS and EU FrailSafe, AGE contributes to the development of “Silver Games” that will be presented on this occasion as practical illustrations of AGE’s position on co-design, responsible research and innovation, as well as active and healthy ageing.

(1) The i-PROGNOSIS Personalised Game Suite will include electronic games targeting physical activity (ExerGames), diet improvement (DietaryGames), emotional expression (EmoGames), as well as handwriting and voice enhancement (Handwriting and VoiceGames) for people living with Parkinson’s disease. The games will be playable in a number of platforms such as the TV and the computer. Personalisation will be a key part of the games, as the consortium’s intention is for the game activities to be adapted to the user’s needs and engagement.

(2) EU FrailSafe explores an innovative solution to detect, quantify, manage and prevent frailty. In a nutshell, EU FrailSafe provides an integrated system to empirically assess and manage frailty based on a variety of dynamic parameters and provide real-time targeted suggestions to the individuals, their caregivers and healthcare professionals. The frailty prevention interventions are provided based on the collected data from various devices, among which serious games (some of which are virtual and augmented reality) challenging accordingly physical, cognitive, psychological, functional and social domains.