SmartWork: designing a smart age-friendly living and working environment for office workers

Abstract

Europe is being severely challenged by the ageing of the population, and although for well over a decade now is looking for strategies to effectively increase the labour force participation of older workers and reduce the rates of early retirement and labour market exit, the unemployment amongst older people remains particularly high. The design and realization of age-friendly living and working environments is a huge challenge that we have just only started to address as the number of older citizens who are and want to continue being active members of society and live independently is constantly increasing. This paper introduces the SmartWork project, which aims at building a worker-centric Artificial Intelligence system for work ability sustainability, integrating unobtrusive sensing and modelling of the worker state with a suite of novel services for context and worker-aware adaptive work support.