The NUIG MARIO team consists of Dr. Dympna Casey (Project Coordinator), Professor Kathy Murphy (Communications manager) and Aisling Dolan Project Manager all from the School of Nursing & Midwifery. In addition Dr. Heike Schmidt-Felzmann (Dept of Philosophy) participate in the project.
The School of Nursing and Midwifery is a research intensive School with an international reputation for high quality research. Care of older people is a key research area within the School and it hosts the Galway Dementia Network, a multidisciplinary network which seeks to develop and support dementia research and policy which leads to improved outcomes for people with dementia. The School is involved in a number of relevant projects including DARES (a trial to evaluate the effectiveness of a reminiscence programme ‐ the DementiA education programme incorporating REminiscence for Staff ‐ for people with dementia residing in long‐stay care settings in Ireland) exploring the meaning of connectedness for older people, quality of life for older people, the meaning of resilience and how to build resilience in persons with dementia and the educational and support needs of carers for people with dementia.
Website: www.nuigalway.ie
The R U Robots team is made up of Geoff Pegman, David Bisset, Mark Burgin and John Foley.
R U Robots is a robotics SME with over 12 years of experience of developing robot solutions for a variety of industries and companies. R U Robots is not a product company but instead develops leading edge solutions for many sectors including healthcare, manufacturing and consumer robots. R U Robots develops full robot prototypes but specializes in control systems, sensor interpretation and Human Robot Interaction.
Website: www.rurobots.co.uk
Ortelio Ltd is a research focused company, working on cloud robotics. We are developing applications that give robots intelligence to take over human tasks. We work along the whole chain of research activities from needs discovery, scientific discovery, technology development, demonstration and validation as well as business model development, project financing and the creation of appropriate framework conditions for adoption. We are members of euRobotics AISBL. Our current work is focused on: a) Developing applications to manage active and healthy aging with the use of caring service robots, and, b) Developing a platform to support software developers in creating robotic applications for different types of robots.
Ortelio’s personnel has led and participated in management, dissemination and exploitation activities in more than 30 international research projects. We have organised over 20 international and national conferences and workshops, and developed numerous online promotion campaigns (including social media presence) for these projects, as well as for a variety of private ventures and initiatives. Part of our work is to assist researchers to identify their assets, to recognise their value and to seek opportunities for protecting them by applying a methodology for effective IPR management and sustainability.
The team of Ortelio in MARIO consists of Stratos Arampatzis, Alexandros Gkiokas and Ilias Trochidis.
Website: www.ortelio.co.uk
Stockport Council is a medium sized municipality in the UK's north-west with around 300,000 residents. Within the Council the Adult Social Care Department aims to help older adults to continue to live as independently as possible within the community.
The Adult Social Care Department carries out an assessment of needs, prioritised according to the urgency of the situation. If the assessed needs fit our eligibility criteria, people are assigned a personal budget to spend on meeting their needs. People can use their personal budget to receive support services such as home care, day care, respite care or breaks for carers, as well as less traditional support options, such as employing a personal assistant. We also support people to access residential and nursing care, where this offers the most appropriate type of support to meet their needs. If the assessed needs do not fit our eligibility criteria, people are supported to access a range of lower level preventative support options, designed to increase their independence and delay their need for more intensive social care support.
We also have a range of support services such as Customer Care, Information and Publicity, IT systems, performance and project management functions and strategy and policy development roles. Finally we are closely linked with NHS Stockport and play a significant role around public health in Stockport.
Stockport Council has considerable and varied experience of delivering successful European Cooperation Projects such as Interreg Projects, CIP Projects, FP7 Project and is currently involved in the following projects: CLIPS ICT-PSP, FP7 Project Silver, SeNS Interreg NWE IV Programme and Cities In Balance NWE IV Programme and more recently Ambient Assistive Living projects. We have also been involved with Grundtvig/Leonardo programmes and closely involved in the EU Year of Active Ageing and Intergenerational Solidarity and the connected development of European Innovation Partnerships where we took part in the Age Friendly Cities pilot.We are also members of the ECH Alliance and AgeingWell Networks.
Our team consists of input from Andy Bleaden. He currently works for Stockport Council based in the UK and since 2002 has led on securing funding and managing EU programmes with a specialism in Regeneration, Low Carbon and Adult Social Care. The latter is particularly focussed around the development of Telehealth and Telemedicine solutions. His background is within Social Care working in Psychiatric settings with offenders as well as employment work with homeless young people. He has a wealth of experience in developing successful long term European Co-operation Partnerships and has been involved with delivering many NWE Interreg Projects. In addition he is involved in Horizon Ambient Assistive Living Programmes, 7th Framework Programmes and ICT PSP programmes. More recently Andy has been working directly with the Commission both as an evaluator for new CIP Programmes and Horizon 2020 projects and is an assessor for existing projects as an external expert. He recently spoke at the launch of the ICT Robotics Call in Luxembourg around PCP for Robotics.
The team will also consist of input from Sally Wilson, Maureen Hughes and Janey Bradbury from Adult Social Care services bringing support from OT, Service Intergration and and Redesign.
Website: www.stockport.gov.uk
The team of CNR consists of Dr. Stefano Nolfi, Dr. Aldo Gangemi, Dr. Valentina Presutti, and Dr. Misael Mongiovì.
The National Research Council (CNR) is an Italian public research organization whose duty is to carry out, promote, spread, transfer and improve research activities in the main sectors of knowledge growth and of its applications for the scientific, technological, economic and social development of the country.
To this end, the activities of the organization are divided into macro areas of interdisciplinary scientific and technological research, concerning several sectors: biotechnology, medicine, materials, environment and land, information and communications, advanced systems of production, judicial and socio‐economic sciences, classical studies and arts.
CNR is distributed all over Italy through a network of institutes aiming at promoting a wide diffusion of its competences throughout the national territory and at facilitating contacts and cooperation with local firms and organizations. The institute of the CNR that will be involved in MARIO proposal is the Institute of Cognitive Sciences and Technologies. The Institute of Cognitive Sciences and Technologies of the National Research Council (ISTC ‐ http://www.istc.cnr.it) is the most important Italian research institute within the cognitive science and technology. ISTC is one of the CNR's 100 autonomous institutes. ISTC includes two laboratories that will be involved within the MARIO proposal: The Laboratory of Artificial Life and Robotics (LARAL ‐ http://laral.istc.cnr.it/) and the Semantic Technology Laboratory (STLab ‐ http://stlab.istc.cnr.it). LARAL is an internationally recognized research group that carries out pioneering research in the area of artificial life, evolutionary robotics and emergence of communication. STLAB, founded in 2008, performs basic and applied research on semantic technologies with an interdisciplinary approach.
Within MARIO, CNR will be leader of the Semantics work package and the cognitive work for the MARIO robot in order to develop social skills.
Website: www.istc.cnr.it
The team of R2M solution consists of Dr. Thomas Messervey, Dr. Diego Reforgiato Recupero and Massimiliano Raciti.
R2M Solution is an integrated and multi‐disciplinary entrepreneurial innovation company that aggressively targets filling the gap between research activities and market implementation across the fields of Innovation, Engineering, Energy Services & Sustainability and ICT/Automation. R2M is a strategic innovator itself and as part of its business model helps organizations and projects plan and execute the strategic use research funding carried out over a comprehensive development strategy from idea to market. In doing so, R2M provides leadership, links high performance exploitation oriented networks, and leverages public and private funding instruments. In its ICT consulting activities, R2M conducts data mining, statistical analysis, extraction, and prediction on social network data. Within MARIO, R2M will be involved in the social understanding of the robots for the mitigation of loneliness, isolation and dementia, useful to provide user requirements to the platform. R2M will also be involved in the development of software modules for robot personalized semantic interaction and behavioral and social skills. R2M will also lead the validation work package, and will provide major contribution within the exploitation activities.
Website: www.r2msolution.com
The hospital “Casa Sollievo della Sofferenza”, founded in 1956 and owned by the Holy See, acts in Italy as a non profit entity and is recognized by the national Ministry of Health as a Research Hospital (IRCCS) specialized in the field of “genetic diseases, innovative therapies and regenerative medicine”. It has an average of 57.000 inpatients every year and is organized in the following nine departments (forty clinical units): Cardiological/Vascular, Emergency Medicine, Developing Age, Oncohaematology, Lab Diagnostics, Surgical Sciences, Medical Sciences, Radiological Sciences. It provides cutting-edge diagnostic and treatment options thanks to its highly qualified professionals and medical equipments. The hospital owns: 1 “Da Vinci” Surgical Robot, 1 CT/PET, 3 linear accelerators, 4 CT (one of which is a 64 multislice device), 1 Ct simulator for Radiotherapy, 4 NMR (one of which with a 3 Tesla magnetic field, one of the first high field devices installed in Europe), 3 digital angiographers, 2 Gamma cameras. About 170 scientific articles are published each year on the most acknowledged scientific journals (e.g. Science, the New England Journal of Medicine, Nature Genetics). The SCIMAGO World Report 2012 included Casa Sollievo Institute in its world list, ranking it 9th in Italy for its scientific output, the first in Southern Italy both for total output and high quality publications. The research activities are mostly funded on a project basis by the Italian Ministry of Health and entities such as the European Commission, plus several public and private funding agencies. The Geriatrics Unit, directly involved in MARIO, takes care of elderly patients with acute disease or relapse of chronic disease through procedures aimed at the identification of the individual risk factors for several pathologic conditions. It has directly been involved in defining a multidimensional approach to frailty and the application of technological innovations for elder subjects with disabilities, cognitive impairments and dementia.
The team of Casa Sollievo della Sofferenza consists of Antonio Greco, Daniele Sancarlo (Geriatrics and Gerontology Division) and Francesco Giuliani (ICT, Innovation and Research Division).
Website: www.operapadrepio.it
The team of Caretta-Net technologies consists of Dr. Christos Kouroupetroglou and Angelos Kouroupetroglou.
Caretta-Net Technologies is a start-up company in Greece active in innovative technology solutions. It’s main activity is to create innovative services and systems by utilizing the internet. With experience in e-business and Internet technologies, Caretta-Net Technologies has created a range of products combined with comprehensive services that respond to the requests of the modern enterprise. Caretta-Net Technologies follows the approach of the "comprehensive solution" to support our customers by creating Web portals, e-Shops, Applications for Smart Phones / Tablets, Service Oriented Systems and Cloud-based systems. In addition Caretta-Net Technologies is largely interested in research on a variety of e-accessibility and e-inclusion related issues and how can outcomes from such research be applied to mainstream every day applications. In that respect, Carreta-Net Technologies in MARIO will be working on aspects of connecting through web technologies the robots infrastructure with the shared knowledge database and helping in the design and development of some end-user applications of MARIO.
Website: www.caretta-net.gr
The team of Universität Passau consists of Prof Dr Siegfried Handschuh, Dr Laurentiu Vasiliu, Mrs Stephanie Pauli and Dr Adamantios Koumpis.
In MARIO project Universität Passau participates with the Chair for Computer Science with a focus on Digital Libraries and Web Information Systems. We build our research agenda on the ideas of distributional semantics, at all three levels of theoretical basic research groundwork, applied technologies and infrastructures, as well as innovative service concepts and applications. We hold a close collaboration with the Technology Transfer Centre of the University in order to make research results accessible and is based on the three pillars of knowledge transfer, continuing education and business start-up consultancy.
Website: www.uni-passau.de