Ageing presents one of the greatest socio-economic challenges of the 21st century. According to estimates more than 20% of Europeans will be 65 or older by 2025. Reacting to related puzzlements of demographic shifts and ageing in general, and guaranteeing the availability of the required structure to help Europe utilise the active and healthy ageing sector’s opportunities, the EU has devoted a high level of resources to ICT projects in the field of active and healthy ageing. As such a considerable number of open platforms for the development of innovative solutions in the Active and Healthy Ageing (AHA) domain have been created.

Against this background the PlatformUptake.eu project seeks to deliver an inventory of the state of the art and analyze the use of open service platforms in the AHA domain, covering both open platforms -such as UniversAAL, FIWARE and partly-open/proprietary platforms developed by industry, and address the interactions between these platforms. To measure the impacts of such platform and enhance their uptake, the project proposal presents a methodology for monitoring open platform development, adoption and spread across Europe, by listing key factors that determine success or hindrance in their uptake by the end-user groups, and also the evolution of their ecosystems and stakeholder networks.

The PlatformUptake.eu project will assess the societal impact of these existing platforms, create monitoring and evaluation toolkits, collect successful user stories and best practices, promote interoperability and define guidelines for a common evolution of such platforms within existing policy frameworks and initiatives. Seeking to support the large-scale uptake of the platforms, the project proposes the creation of an online information hub which provides descriptive and support materials on all existing platforms, the organisation of several stakeholder events, as well as a Massive Open Online Course for promoting synergies, knowledge exchange and a common understanding among all stakeholders in the Active and Healthy Ageing market.