SMILE — Co-Creating a Smart Living Ecosystem for Ageing in Place

SMILE (Smart Inclusive Living Environments) was an EU Horizon 2020 project (grant agreement 101016848), coordinated by Sykehuset Innlandet HF (Innlandet Hospital Trust, Norway) with partners including SINTEF, Norway Health Tech, Copenhagen University, Stichting Smart Homes (Netherlands) and McMaster University (Canada). It ran January 2021 to September 2024 with a total budget of €5.91 million (€3.99 million from the EU, plus roughly €1.8 million from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research).

Rather than designing technology for older people, SMILE set out to co-create it with them — building a Smart Living Environment ecosystem around an AI-based Digital Care Facilitator and a conversational agent to support daily living and reduce social isolation for people living with severe dementia, COPD, or recovering from surgery.

Four living labs — in Norway, Denmark, the Netherlands and Canada — worked directly with older adults to shape the ecosystem. The consortium published four reusable frameworks: the 4E matrix (include, engage, empower, emancipate marginalised users in design), the GO-TO model as a design navigator, the Epital Care Model for care infrastructure, and a Readiness and Enablement Index for Health Technology. After the grant closed in September 2024, the team launched a Knowledge Hub to keep supporting digital care for frail older adults at home.

As a research-and-pilot project, SMILE's public record does not include independent, large-scale outcome data — for example on hospitalisation rates — beyond the four living labs, so its reach and impact should be read as demonstrated at pilot scale, not yet at national scale.