AAL Legacy
Insights and learnings from 16 years of innovation
16 years of impact
We are living longer than ever before. In response, European efforts over the past decade have increasingly focused on supporting active and healthy ageing and addressing the practical challenges it brings.
The Active & Assisted Living (AAL) Programme—launched in 2008 and comprising 14 calls for proposals – was a European funding initiative that supported over 300 cross-border projects combining public and private actors. Its mission was to improve the lives of older adults through technology, foster innovation in the emerging age-tech sector, and contribute to the sustainability of care systems.
The study design
The insights presented on this page highlight the main messages of a broader evaluation study conducted by IDEA Consult for the AAL Association.
The study harnessed the power of artificial intelligence – specifically large language models (LLMs) – to analyse over 30,000 documents related to the AAL Programme. The findings were generated through an iterative process that combined AI-derived indicators with expert validation, ensuring both the reliability and traceability of results. Insights were drawn from a wide range of sources, including individual project files and programme-level documentation, in order to comprehensively respond to 17 evaluation questions. While the methodology was designed to minimise errors, occasional inaccuracies or AI hallucinations may still occur. If you identify any mistakes or inconsistencies, please report them to guy.vandebergh@aal-europe.eu.
End-users' involvement
Co-creation at scale
Broad Participation Across Europe
Over 60,000 older adults and around 14,000 caregivers—including family members, volunteers, nurses, and therapists—took part in more than 300 projects. Their involvement ranged from surveys and focus groups to long-term pilot testing in homes and care settings. This broad base of participation supported more inclusive and practice-oriented innovation.
Stronger User Involvement Over Time
Early projects often relied on brief consultations or online platforms. Over time, the focus shifted to deeper, sustained collaboration. By the final calls, more than half of projects practiced co-design, using workshops and rapid prototyping. Real-life testing became more common, helping to generate relevant feedback and support long-term use.
Public and Care Sector Engagement
As the programme evolved, municipalities, care providers, housing bodies, and insurers became central partners. Their involvement rose to over 50 % in later calls, offering critical insights on ecosystem integration and financial sustainability. Their presence helped align solutions with real-world service delivery and improved prospects for post-grant adoption.
User Engagement as a Cornerstone of Success
Projects that treated engagement as a continuous and structured process saw stronger outcomes. Those using repeated feedback loops and embedded testing reported fewer late-stage changes and higher trust. Where this was missing, even promising solutions struggled to prove value or scale beyond pilot settings.
Challenges addressed and technological aspects
AAL projects consistently converged on nine inter-related societal challenges.
Addressing the real-life needs & wishes of older adults was at the heart of the AAL Programme. The solutions funded through the programme typically responded to one or more of nine major societal challenges linked to ageing, ranging from social isolation and loneliness, addressed by 43% of funded projects, to sensory impairment compensation, covered by 5%.
Social isolation & loneliness
43%
Independence in activities of daily living
38%
Cognitive decline
& mental-health
problems
28%
Physical function
and mobility
26%
Real-time safety &
emergency response
23%
Care-giver burden
reduction
22%
Chronic-disease
self-management
18%
Environmental
adaptation
9%
Sensory-impairment compensation
5%
The fourteen calls mark a shift
from single-purpose tools to integrated services
aligned with care pathways and daily routines.
Evolution in technology
Basic sensors → Predictive AI
Many early AAL projects made use of ambient sensing—such as motion detectors or pressure pads—to support basic monitoring and emergency alerts. Over time, these systems became more capable, with a growing share incorporating machine-learning components that could adapt to individual routines, identify signs of frailty or health deterioration in advance, and integrate with cloud-based analytics. By 2021, predictive features had become a common element across the programme.
Islands → Plug-and-Play Ecosystems
Early solutions were often closed and device-specific, making them hard to extend or scale. The adoption of open interoperability standards—such as FHIR®, universAAL and MQTT—enabled regions to build flexible, vendor-neutral platforms. This shift allowed new functions like medication support or robotic rehabilitation to be added without redesigning the whole system.
Evolution of the programme and business aspects
Commercialisation beyond the grant
AAL projects were designed with market entry in mind. Those that combined user involvement, open system design and structured business support proved far more likely to attract follow-on investment and advance towards deployment.
SMEs as drivers of innovation
As the programme evolved, small and medium-sized enterprises became central actors. By the final calls, they were coordinating two thirds of projects and formed the operational core of multidisciplinary consortia.
Built-in acceleration for market readiness
Support initiatives such as the AAL2Business Lean-Start-up Academy, investor coaching and regulatory clinics were systematically integrated into project lifecycles—helping teams move from early-stage concepts to investment-ready solutions.
From isolated pilots to a coordinated pipeline
The AAL Programme shifted from one-off experimentation to a structured innovation pathway. Tiered funding tools, flexible consortium models and horizontal business services laid the foundation for a growing European market in technologies for ageing well.
Lessons learned
From idea to impact
Over more than a decade, the AAL Programme tested what works - and what doesn’t. The result: seven broad recommendations, grounded in hard-won lessons
Beyond these overarching insights, more specific lessons and recommendations are available for specific audiences – innovators, programme operators, and policymakers – in the Read more section.
# 1
Start from real needs
Calls structured around practical care or wellbeing challenges—not specific technologies—consistently attracted stronger, more diverse consortia. This approach encouraged integrated solutions with social, clinical and economic value. Future programmes should begin with a clear, real-world gap and leave space for flexible, cross-disciplinary responses.
# 2
Make priorities explicit in evaluation
Embedding criteria like co-design, ethical compliance and business readiness into the evaluation grid shaped how projects were developed. When these priorities were visible and mandatory, applicants responded with structured living-lab approaches, GDPR-compliant data flows, and early business planning. Clear expectations lead to better practices.
# 3
Support risk and growth with tiered tools
AAL’s tiered funding—from short pilots to full innovation actions—allowed risky ideas to fail early and gave promising ones room to evolve. Complemented by targeted support services (e.g. regulatory advice, market intelligence), this model combined flexibility with discipline. It enabled both experimentation and maturity.
# 4
Strengthen administrative coordination
National-level differences in contracting created long delays and uneven access, undermining trust. Cross-country programmes should adopt service-level agreements, shared tools, and coordinated training to ensure more consistent delivery. Better alignment supports faster progress and prevents erosion of SMEs’ confidence.
# 5
Balance focus with openness
A strong thematic focus—such as ageing and care—builds deep expertise and user trust. But it can also lead to siloed approaches, regional imbalance, and burdensome certification if not managed carefully. These risks can be addressed through cross-sector standards and blended finance instruments.
# 6
Enable real collaboration across borders
Multi-country delivery expands learning and shapes shared standards, but only if backed by harmonised processes. Clear timelines, shared compliance templates, and dedicated programme coordination are needed to avoid participant fatigue and make collaboration workable at scale.
# 7
Present solutions positively
How a solution is framed affects whether people engage with it. Projects that presented technologies as tools for independence saw higher uptake than those focused on risk or decline. Future programmes must consider not just usability, but also the psychological and emotional framing of innovation.