Digital Health for Active Ageing Communities

CIM Viseu Dão Lafões is an intermunicipal community in the Centro Region of Portugal, bringing together 14 municipalities across a territory of approximately 3,483 km² and around 259,590 inhabitants in 2024. Located between the Portuguese coast and the interior, it combines more dynamic urban centres with low-density rural areas. The region faces a heterogeneous demographic reality, with significant differences between municipalities and between rural and urban areas. Although recent immigration has helped slow the decline in the number of young adults, low fertility and low birth rates remain a structural challenge, continuing to affect generational renewal.

In this context, CIM Viseu Dão Lafões aims to address ageing not only as a demographic pressure, but as a policy challenge requiring integrated territorial responses. The main policy entry point is the need to move beyond fragmented measures and strengthen coordination between social services, health prevention, mobility, digital tools and community-based support systems. This is especially relevant in a territory where accessibility, isolation, service delivery and equal opportunities vary significantly across municipalities.

The project idea builds on the assumption that ageing well is not only a matter of healthcare provision. It also depends on the ability of older people to live safely at home, maintain autonomy in daily life, access support when needed, and remain connected to their community. From this perspective, digital health is understood not as a purely technological solution, but as an enabler of safer, more preventive, more personalised and more dignified ageing pathways.

The network would bring together cities facing different ageing-related challenges, from rural or low-density territories to medium-sized urban areas, to explore and test integrated solutions such as remote monitoring, safe-home technologies, digital follow-up tools and community-based support models. By working across different local realities, partner cities would generate practical knowledge, transferable approaches and concrete small-scale actions that could be adapted elsewhere.

Its ambition is to help cities move from fragmented responses to ageing towards a more connected model of care, prevention and wellbeing, where digital health supports autonomy, inclusion and quality of life in later years.