Thess-AHALL, operational since 2014, and a unique setting in the city of Thessaloniki, Central Macedonia region (Northern Greece). The lab fosters initiatives encouraging regional development and healthcare systems sustainability by the provision of novel technologies and innovation. The lab is actively engaged with the end-users and relevant community stakeholders, actively pursuing co-creation and co-design of technological solutions to improve health and social conditions and facilitate independent living. The main goal is to facilitate the ultimate aim of speeding up innovation, collaboration, development and testing of more accurate services, which is achieved by the early involvement of users as co-creators.

The lab’s main strengths lie with the operation in actual community settings and residences following a paradigm of actual in-the-wild collection and processing of data, offerring ecological validity schemes, a strategic geographical location and a wide, trans-national network with strong collaboration capacity with the Active and Healthy Ageing (AHA) ecosystem in Greece and the Balkan region and along experience in user driven innovation and evidence-based research in the AHA domain. The underlying Big Data infrastructure with the existence of big and heterogeneous volumes of data stemming from the large scale pilots with seniors puts ThessAHALL in a pivotal  position. Finally, Thess-AHALL aims to develop a business plan for self-sustainability, in line with the ENoLL’s strategy, facilitating the people demand with the active involvement of SMEs within pilots.

The Thess-AHALL is governed by the Laboratory of Medical Physics, School of Medicine, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki which has essentially spinned-off two commercial entities: the self-funded (University based) initiative LLM Care and Neuroanadrasi which was founded by members of the Lab based on exploiting the neuroscientific capacity of the Lab. Apart from the involvment of exernal SMEs and research groups, Thess-AHALL has also built strong collaborations with nursing homes, daily care centres, municipalities, Regional Health Authorities of Attica and Central Macedonia, Elderly care centres of the Greek Federation of Alzheimer’s Associations (some 20 units, spread throughout Greece).