1. Description
E‑VITA: EU-Japan Virtual Coach for Smart Aging is a EU-Japan joint project under Horizon 2020 and MIC funding. Altogether 22 partners in Japan and the EU are researching about new technologies and methods helping aging people. In Japan the project is headed by Tohoku University, Smart Aging Research Centre (SARC).
The combination of the socio-technology excellence “Made in Europe” with the excellence of technology “Made in JThe combination of the socio-technology excellence “Made in Europe” with the excellence of technology “Made in Japan” will produce an innovative coaching system based on the needs and wishes of older adults. The virtual coach will provide personalized recommendations and interventions to improve the quality of life of older adults in Europe and Japan while offering opportunities to SME’s and NGO’s to explore the feasibility of a new ecosystem. The impact should be Empowering older adults to better manage their own activities will have an impact on increasing the wellbeing of older adults and will improve their quality of life via socio-technological support of “Active and Healthy Ageing” in Europe and Japan.
2. Participant
3. Bio
Dr. Lorenz Granrath is Specially Appointed Assistant Professor at Tohoku University, Smart Aging Research Center (SARC) since May 2021. The competence of SARC is fighting dementia by researching the correlations with health and lifestyle. Dr. Granrath is supporting SARC in organizing the Japanese side of the project e‑VITA, especially looking at the dissemination and he is initiating new international collaborations with institutes and industry for SARC. Besides that, he also acts as Non-Key Expert for the EU in Human Centric AI, he is Senior Advisor for some companies and Visiting Lecturer for the Ph.D. course EnergyNext at Waseda University. He worked the past seven years as Senior Innovation Coordinator at the AI Research Center of AIST, initiating international AI research projects. Before that he set up the Fraunhofer Representative Office Japan since 2001 building up a big network in industry and science.
Ryan Browne is research assistant at the Smart Aging Research Centre. He completed an MSc in Basic Medical Science at the Graduate School of Medicine, Tohoku University, investing the relationship between the neuro-immune system and Alzheimer’s disease progression using mouse models; as well as investigating the relationship between the APOE e4 allele and brain structure in young adults from SARC’s human-MRI database; and joined an international collaborative research project that looked at cellular stress defense mechanisms in the context of space flight. Before that, he completed an MSci at Imperial College London in Chemistry with Molecular Physics, researching nanoscale devices in the field of non-equilibrium thermodynamics.