Managing frailty in Europe: Advantage Joint Action kick-off meeting in Madrid
On the 19th and 20th of January 2017, the Joint Action ADVANTAGE initiative celebrated its kick-off meeting in Madrid.
A total of 64 participants representing the 22 Member States and over 40 organizations that form the Consortium attended, as well as invitees from several EU funded projects and representatives from the European Commission (DG SANTE and CHAFEA).
Mr. Martin Seychell, Deputy-Director General, DG SANTE and Mrs. Elena Andradas Director General for Public Health, Quality and Innovation Spanish Ministry of Health, Social Services and Equality addressed the audience in the official opening session. They both stressed the importance of the demographic change in our society and how this joint work is key to tackle frailty at European level, the main condition associated to disability in older people.
individualized, integrated Virtual Patient Model (VPM) is created. A wide range of clinical data, such as the patient’s medical history, cognitive status, self-care ability, nutritional status, living conditions, social life, and other parameters, are entered by the clinician. Then, using technological instruments, such as wearable technology, smartphones, GPS and other devices, the VPM is actively fed with physiological data, such as patient’s body weight, blood pressure, heart and respiratory rate, postural and movement information, indoors and outdoors localization and cognitive performance. Sandra explains that EU FrailSafe promotes an integrated system to empirically assess and manage frailty and provide real-time targeted suggestions to the individuals, their caregivers and healthcare professionals. The goal of the system is the multimodal approach of frailty to better understand and describe the syndrome, explore its causal relations with other comorbidities and define the predictive factors which lead to the progression of the disease.