Architectures and Models for a Sustainable Care - Technology

The process of ageing population is traditionally considered a topic of interest to scholars and policy makers dealing with public finance. However, the process not only affects public spending and its long term sustainability, but also the structure of consumption and production of goods and services, some of them not yet easily affordable even for the majority of industrialized countries.
The SWAS aims to undertake analysis of how public and private spending constraints, in an ageing population environment, push developed countries industrial structures to go through a hard restructuring process.
The process should involve:

• the development of innovative technologies based on flexible and adaptive architectures able to allow people to work longer in better health conditions;
• the development of advanced technologies able to reduce expenses for taking care of elder people;
• the development of regulations allowing elder people to work longer and using more autonomous and sophisticated machines, ITC appliances and devices in working environments.

The SWAS aims at collecting information and analyzing how, in Germany, Japan and Italy, policy makers, research centers,
independent think tanks and companies producing goods and services for senior people are:

• elaborating strategies in order to take care and empower a better quality of life of aged people in the constrained environment of a slowing growth scenario;
• boosting technologies to tackle and alleviate some of the major problems connected with the management of the process;
• helping the updating of industrial capacity, in order to exploit opportunities that economies of scale offer to provide goods and services for senior people affordable in a slowing growth environment.

Sustainability of retirement systems and of public spending of developed countries needs consumers to be able to work for longer period of their lives and to get access to less expensive caring systems. Less dependent consumers, more tax payers and more affordable goods and services for health and caring activities could help societies to achieve upper level of social fairness from an
intergeneration point of view.

Participants to the SWAS gather to discuss on:

• how a timely investment by enterprises that provide goods and services for the aged people (like, for example, in the domain of domotics and mobility) can help the achievement of economically sustainable caring plans for not working cohorts;
• how technologies and policies for inclusion (like, for example, collaborative working and social communities) can help people to be productive at work for a longer period;
• how new legal frameworks can let labour markets to absorb aged and less productive workers. A working aged person may provide a significant contribution to the sustenaibility of the social safety net and its working mechanisms. Furthermore, due to his increased income he may promote new opportunities to foster growth;
• how financial frameworks and institutions can provide financial resources to develop the supply side of the silver market. In particular, it should be analyzed how project financing and venture capital can help policy makers and companies to accelerate the development of needed infrastructures and support university spin-offs and enterprises engaged in developing innovative layers of the hard and software architectures.

Final goal of the SWAS is to contribute in facing the challenges that the ageing
population process is posing by providing some feedback for initiatives under
consideration in Europe and Japan like:

• The development of an efficient supply side in markets for goods and services for the aged people (i.e., the Innovative Financing Models for Infrastructure Development proposed in the EU Innovation Policy established by DG Enterprise and Industry of the European Commission)
• The training of experts from the private and the public sectors (i.e., the Executive Workshop on The Ageing Society-EWAS)
• The design of innovative user-centric research methodology for sensing, prototyping, validating and refining complex solutions in multiple and evolving real life contexts where users are exposed to new ICT solutions (i.e., the LivingLab on the Ageing Society-EWAS).

SWAS Steering Committee
Stefania Bandini: CSAI@Università di Milano-Bicocca (Milano)
Ludovico Ciferri: ISMB-Politecnico di Torino (Tokyo)
Florian Coulmas: German Institute for Japanese Studies (Tokyo)
Pietro Ginefra: Banca d’Italia (Tokyo)
Toshiro Ohashi: Hokkaido University (Sapporo)
Konrad Osterwalder: University of the United Nations (Tokyo)
Paola Subacchi: Chatham House (London)