Project · ADA
ADA: An IoT-based virtual coaching platform for assisting daily life activities of ageing persons with Down syndrome.
A multidisciplinary IoT and virtual-coaching project for supporting autonomy and healthy ageing in people with Down syndrome, combining unobtrusive smart objects, personalised data analytics and daily-life coaching.
Period2017 – 2019StatusCompletedFundingJoint Project · University of Verona · Piccola Fraternità Onlus
Objective
ADA investigated how digital technology could support ageing people with Down syndrome in maintaining autonomy, social well-being and healthy daily routines. The project was motivated by the longer life expectancy of people with Down syndrome and by the specific challenges associated with an earlier and accelerated ageing process.
Rather than treating coaching as a generic reminder system, ADA aimed to strengthen self-efficacy and help users cope with everyday activities through a personalised virtual-coaching platform adapted to the person’s needs and coaching plan.
Technical approach
The platform combined unobtrusive smart objects, Internet of Things technologies and data analytics. Smart objects provided observations from daily activities; analytics were intended to recognise the person’s needs, match them against the coaching plan and help select an appropriate personalised response.
The project therefore brought together embedded and IoT systems with data analysis and a human-centred coaching model. The University of Verona project record describes the work as explicitly multidisciplinary, involving social-care professionals, coaching specialists, researchers in education for people with intellectual disabilities and ICT researchers working on IoT, embedded systems and data analytics.
Demonstrator
Medication-taking was selected as a concrete use case for requirements gathering and feasibility assessment. It provided a daily-life activity in which the system could explore how smart objects, contextual information and personalised coaching could work together while keeping the broader goal focused on autonomy rather than on the technology itself.
Project record
The former CISD record identifies Florenc Demrozi as project referent and lists Fabio Chiarani, Stefano Tamburin, Graziano Pravadelli, Florenc Demrozi and Cristian Turetta among the contributors. The current University of Verona project catalogue lists Graziano Pravadelli as project manager and participant.
The two surviving institutional records use slightly different administrative periods: the legacy CISD detail page gives 2017–2019, while the current University project catalogue gives a starting date of 1 January 2018 and a duration of 24 months. This site preserves the dates attached to the migrated CISD project identity and retains the current University record as its institutional link rather than silently collapsing the two records.