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European aging population has placed new demands on family units and raises pressing questions about the efficiency and management of care and support technologies and services for dependent people. Assistive technologies will play a key role in social inclusion, independency and autonomy of elderly people and disabled people, transforming the research activities in assistive technologies in the real solution to everyday life people in real conditions.

The creation of the AT Cluster of San Sebastián is going to coordinate RTD and innovation efforts of stakeholders working in the sector, from local public administration, research centers with high expertise in AT, companies investing and commercialising AT and final users that increasingly demand these technologies to improve the dependent people care.

Even if the AT sector can play a major role in San Sebastián economic development and competitiveness, the current situation at local level presents some key barriers which have to be faced:

Lack of coordination among RTD and innovation stakeholders

Lack of innovation on AT technology market that has not changed much over the last 30 years.


The objective of the project is to facilitate the emergence of new regional research driven clusters and mutual exchange of information, whose main aim is to “foster seed-beds to create new regional research-driven clusters of the basis of support form the public and private sectors”:
To ensure the achievement of the proposed objectives, the project is structured in 9 workpackages. The mentoring of EU experts in AT along all the project duration has been envisaged under WP1, for ensuring that the key documents developed under the project will be relevant, consistent and with high impact. Additionally, WP2 and WP3 will consider the framework in which assistive technology sector has developed with the objective of having an overall view on the initiatives boosted from the public administrations and on the evolution of the AT technology market. Furthermore, the local economic and RTD potentiality of San Sebastián will be analysed in WP4 in order to objectively assess the San Sebastián opportunities for the successful creation of the cluster. The focus of WP5 will be to mobilise all the local stakeholders around the cluster creation in order to extract jointly agreed, contrasted and validated the Cluster Research Agenda and Implementation Plan that will elaborated in parallel respectively in WP6 and WP7.

Finally, WP8 will focus on the dissemination of the results achieved in the project and WP8 will ensure the correct management of the project and the monitoring of the progress.

The main expected result of the project will be the Implementation Plan that will be the roadmap for the final creation of the AT cluster of San Sebastián.

General objective:

to set the basis for the creation a new research driven cluster on assistive technologies (AT) in San Sebastián (Basque Country) to improve the coordination of the local stakeholders working in the field and maximise the efforts and existing infrastructures for improving socioeconomic development and strengthen the RTD and innovation capacity of not only of the city, but also acting as facilitator and catalyst at regional level.

Specific objectives:

To coordinate the RTD and innovation efforts of San Sebastián AT stakeholders and to align the RTD strategy with the regional, national and European programmes and plans

To increase the social and economic development at local and regional level by means of promoting the AT research driven cluster and the activities associated to it.

To increase the knowledge and experience sharing with other European clusters working in health and dependency.

To increase the capacity of public administrations to boost the assistive technology clusters at local level in the medium and longer term.