The French team of the Lab-STICC (UMR CNRS), specialized in adaptive human-system interactions, and the DOMUS laboratory in Quebec, which specializes in cognitive assistance to the individual, will be partnering to design, produce and evaluate smart technology to assist occupational therapists in their interventions with individuals living with cognitive impairments. These tools will enhance the work of occupational therapists by allowing them to monitor their work more accurately at a distance, using observation, analysis and synthesis devices for patient activity as well as a virtual assistant that can be used to monitor the work of occupational therapists. The virtual assistant will be autonomous and configurable by the occupational therapist. We will use the DOMUS COOK culinary assistant and the virtual assistant of the STICC-Lab to explore how occupational therapists can master these new technologies and how the latter can assist them in their practice, particularly in the design of rehabilitation plans developed in accordance with the objective data they collect during the evaluations they carry out within the homes of individuals living with cognitive impairments. The overall idea of the project is to explore how these data can be used by smart technology to propose interventions that will be later given by the virtual assistant to continue the person’s cognitive rehabilitation within their homes.

Researchers in the Health and Wellbeing domain need 1) convenient access to research infrastructures, 2) direct engagement of people in order to validate hypotheses, co-design solutions and services, evaluate their feasibility and effectiveness and participate in the translation and mobilization of outcomes and 3) experience from multidisciplinary domains (e.g. healthcare management, assistive technologies, data science) to deal with the complexity of health and wellbeing research. Over the last few years, Living Labs have emerged as resilient research and innovation infrastructures and have proved to be key to the integration of research and innovation processes in real life settings, focusing primarily on people and their engagement in research procedures. VITALISE opens up Living Lab Infrastructures as a means to facilitate and promote research activities in the Health and Wellbeing domain in Europe and beyond by enabling in-person Transnational Access to 17 Living Lab research infrastructures and by supporting remote digital access to datasets (Virtual Access) of rehabilitation, transitional care and everyday life activities through harmonized processes and common tools. VITALISE will design and develop ICT tools for shared access of similar devices and applications used across Living Labs, as well as for collecting, storing and sharing datasets. Lastly, VITALISE will invest in the development of Training methods towards the wider understanding and valorisation of Living Lab methodologies in the research community.