The Active & Assisted Living (AAL) Programme, a funding scheme for research, development and innovation of ICT solutions that supports active aging of elderly people and co-funded by the European Commission, has published the call for 2016 “Living well with dementia”.

The aim of the AAL Programme is to provide innovative ICT- based solutions including products, systems or services to enhance older adults’ quality of life and to strengthen the industrial base in Europe. The main goal is to improve the autonomy, participation in social life, skills, and employability of older adults. Solutions funded under the AAL Programme address identified wishes and needs of the end-users, are transnational, collaborative and cost-shared between private and public funding. AAL projects aim at introducing their solution to the market within a maximum of 2-3 years after finalisation of the project.

The focus of the 2016 Call Challenge of the AAL Programme is to fund transnational and multi-disciplinary collaborative projects with a clear route to market that will enable the wellbeing of people with dementia and their communities (family, caregivers, service providers, care system, etc). The proposals should include a user-centered approach as well as pilots with a considerable number of end-users involved in order to demonstrate the benefits and added-value necessary to make a significant impact on the market.

The partnership must be composed of at least three bodies located in three different countries participating in the AAL Programme.

The consortium must include at least:

• one eligible business partner;
• one eligible SME partner which can be the business partner;
• one eligible end-user organization.

In addition to the above mentioned central eligibility criteria, additional national requirements defined by the AAL Partner States shall apply. The National Eligibility Criteria document must be consulted in order to check the specific compliance of each partner of the consortium.

The indicative total funding under this call is 30.244.000 euro, of which 12.384.000 euro is the contribution made available by the European Commission.

The budget of each funded project will be up to 5 million euro, with a maximum funding from the AAL Programme of 2.5 million euro.

Proposals must be submitted within the deadline of 26 May 2016, via the electronic submission tool accessible at: http://proposals.aal-europe.eu/aal-call-2016.

More information and all official documents for this call can be found on the AAL website: http://www.aal-europe.eu/.