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Health & Care INNOVATION
The FriWalk: A robotic smart walker to enhance elderly mobility in indoor environments
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Market Maturity: Market Ready
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Market Creation Potential
This innovation was assessed by the JRC’s Market Creation Potential indicator framework as having a Moderate” level of Market Creation Potential. Only innovations that are showing multiple signals of market creation potential are assigned a value under this indicator system. Learn more
Go to Market needs
Needs that, if addressed, can increase the chances this innovation gets to (or closer to) the market incude:
  • Prepare for Market entry
Location of Key Innovators developing this innovation
Key Innovators
The EU-funded Research Project
This innovation was developed under the Horizon 2020 project ACANTO with an end date of 31/07/2018
  • Read more about this project on CORDIS
Description of Project ACANTO
Despite its recognised benefits, most older adults do not engage in a regular physical activity. The ACANTO project proposes a friendly robot walker (the FriWalk) that will abate a some of the most important barriers to this healthy behaviour. The FriWalk revisits the notion of robotic walking assistants and evolves it towards an activity vehicle. The execution of a programme of physical training is embedded within familiar and compelling every-day activities. The FriWalk operates as a personal trainer triggering the user actions and monitoring their impact on the physical and mental well-being. It offers cognitive and emotional support for navigation pinpointing risk situations in the environment and understanding the social context. It supports coordinated motion with other FriWalks for group activities. The FriWalk combines low cost and advanced features, thanks to its reliance on a cloud of services that increase its computing power and interconnect it to other assisted living devices. Very innovative is its ability to collect observations on the user preferred behaviours, which are consolidated in a user profile and used for recommendation of future activities. In this way, the FriWalk operates as a gateway toward a CyberPhysical Social Network (CPSN), which is an important contribution of the project. The CPSN is at the basis of a recommendation system in which users' profiles are created, combined into "circles" and matched with the opportunity offered by the environment to generate recommendations for activities to be executed with the FriWalk support. The permanent connection between users and CPSN is secured by the FriPad, a tablet with a specifically designed user interface. The CPSN creates a community of users, relatives and therapists, who can enter prescriptions on the user and receive information on her/his state. Users are involved in a large number in all the phases of the system development and an extensive validation is carried out at the end.

Innnovation Radar's analysis of this innovation is based on data collected on 25/09/2018.
The unique id of this innovation in the European Commission's IT systems is: 17654