The Assisted Living Innovation Platform is delivering a wideranging programme to enable the ageing population and those with long-term health conditions to live with greater independence.

People are living longer, and this is a cause for celebration and a testimony to the advances made during the last 50 years in healthcare and technology, but the number who will have longterm conditions, and as they grow old become frail, is set to increase. At the same time, the number of economically active people who can finance health and social care is falling. Today's care models are unsustainable, and this is a major concern for the social care and health services in the UK.

The Technology Strategy Board is working with the Department of Health (DoH), primary care trusts, research councils, local authorities, academia, industry and third-sector organisations to develop technologies and services that will enable individuals to receive support at home.

The Technology Strategy Board launched the Assisted Living Innovation Platform (ALIP) in November 2007, with additional funding from the DoH's National Institute for Health Research, the Engineering and Physical Science Research Council, and the Economic and Social Research Council. We are investing jointly with these organisations and industry to address the challenge of assisted living. We are funding projects until 2012, with the intention to deliver an impact for many years beyond.

The priorities

To identify ALIP's priorities, we held consultations with other organisations, published a technology roadmap, and held priority-setting workshops. An industry-led steering group continues to guide us on priorities. It also includes representatives from the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS), the DoH and academia. Priorities include the need to:

• transfer and share knowledge between different industry sectors, health and care professionals, and users
• tailor assisted living technologies and services to the needs of each user
• design technologies and services that are desirable and affordable
• design technologies and services that are interoperable and work anytime and anywhere.

We also recognise that scaling up will be a challenge and that lessons from the WSD programme will need to guide future research.

Future projects

The Innovation Platform will also address issues such as quality of life, and health and wellbeing, to ensure that home-based devices and services are relevant, acceptable, scalable and marketable. Subjects for basic research are:

• business and economic modelling- because adopting new ways of delivering health and care in both the public and private sector involves complex management and organisational change where the benefits are difficult to quantify, and
• social and behavioural studies - because people and the imperative for improved quality of life remain at the centre of our strategy.

This will lead to new research over the next two to three years.