MAESTRO

MAESTRO is a €3.1 million Ambient Assisted Living [AAL] project funded by the European Commission. The MAESTRO project aims to develop an online portal which will help older people and their care network (formal and informal carers) to find trusted, quality assisted living products and services which meet their individual needs.

The MAESTRO project is being run by a pan-European group of Academic Institutes and SME’s led by the Luxembourg Institute of Science and Technology and includes Coherent Streams and Domosafety Smart Home’s, Switzerland, Dundalk Institute of Technology and STATSports, Ireland, I+ and the Institute for Cognitive Science and Technology, Italy.

There are two key deliverables of the MAESTRO project; firstly to build a reference framework which will firstly profile users in order to guide them to AAL products and services which best meet their individual needs and secondly; to develop an accreditation procedure to guide manufacturers to build products and services which better meet the needs of older people.

The Irish MAESTRO team, led by Dundalk Institute of Technology, is creating a ‘MAESTRO accreditation process’ which will combine elements of the World Health Organisations International Classification of Functioning, the ISO’s Guide 71 along with other bespoke classification standards.

This is the cornerstone of the MAESTRO platform, providing relevant trust to both older people and their caregiving network in finding good quality suitable AAL products and services. Using the same classification model, the MAESTRO team is developing an online needs assessment questionnaire whereby older adults, along both their formal and informal care network, can input information about themselves. This information will help guide the search to a list of ‘MAESTRO approved’ AAL products and services which meet their specific needs. The project will be piloted throughout 2018. In Ireland, NetwellCASALA are leading trials with partners STATSports, the global leaders in elite sports monitoring systems and Siel Bleu, a not for profit organisation who deliver fitness programmes to older people. The findings will inform a reference framework for the portal. The project is due to complete in December 2018.

For more information contact Karen Coan