<< Background >>It is estimated that 80 % of care work is provided by informal carers in Europe. There are thousands of Europeans, mostly women caring for a family member with support needs and specially the older adults. Many of those women are out of the labour market and face challenges in accessing adequate resources, support services and social benefits. Leaving these informal carers without support exposes them to poverty, health problems and undermines gender equality. This situation is accentuated by an acceleration of the digital transformation in the healthcare sector which requires the ability to manipulate and use e-health services and related technologies, on a daily basis, to provide the older adults with an adapted level of care. And to be able to do so, informal carers need to access adequate and adapted training and skills development notably related to digital competences.The DIGITALIS project will focus on female informal caregivers (FICs) with special focus on those providing long-term homecare and who need to re-enter the labour market after a long period of inactivity. Within the “Informal care in Europe” (Verbakel and al., 2017) it was revealed that on average, 34.3% of the population in 20 European countries were informal caregivers and 7.6% were intensive caregivers (providing care for minimum 11 h a week) with a prevalence among middle-aged women (50-59 years old) who are likely to be the first to respond to higher demands for informal care, while they are also the major target groups in employment policies aiming for increased labour market participation. The DIGITALIS project will tackle two major needs of the target group:-Needs in terms of training opportunity: from a major data collection conducted in 2017 by COFACE Families Europe, it appears that almost 2/3 of the respondents were never offered the opportunity to take part in any training, or skill development. Within DIGITALIS, the training offer will be notably related to the daily usage of specific digital healthcare services that FICs have to manipulate to provide care to their older adults’ relatives. To be as close as possible to the everyday life and to the needs of FICs who will participate to the project, the national contexts and specificities associated to the digital healthcare environments will be analysed as those can vary from a country to another. -Need to enhance professional experience and diversify opportunities for employability after a long period of time out of the labour market: by providing long-term care, FICs have acquired informal learning in different fields related to care support and most of the time they are not aware of it. Through the project, those valuable experiences will be collected notably through co-creation workshops which will be conducted to better frame and support the development of the digital skills training programme content.<< Objectives >>The main objective of the DIGITALIS project is to empower female informal carers with the essential digital skills and knowledge to fully exploit the potential of digital healthcare services and technologies to improve their own professional situation as well as the quality of life and safety of their relatives.DIGITALIS will have the following Specific Objectives (SO) to support the achievement of the above main objective:SO1: Improve the digital skills and competences of female informal carers for employability through an adapted and tailored-made training programme in 2 Piloting Countries (Greece and Hungary);SO2: Define and validate a complete national digital healthcare services and technologies landscape and the related digital skills roadmap according to the female informal caregivers’ needs in 2 Piloting Countries (Greece and Hungary); SO3: Develop, test and assess innovative e-learning courses and modules based on social innovation and human-centered approaches to better respond to female informal carers learning needs;SO4: Structure the main results, lessons learnt, informal carers testimonies and policy recommendations into a practical guide to enable dissemination and replicability at the European level.Reach the identified objectives calls for transnational cooperation. The Cooperation partnership brings together a foundation, a research institute, SMEs and an association with complementary expertise from 3 European countries. Through this transnational partnership, which addresses common problematics in improving the digital skills and competences of informal carers for employability, the partners will join forces, pool their ideas and resources into DIGITALIS to capitalise on their past experiences from other European projects. Thus, the project will address the challenges of training and recognition of informal carers’ status on a European scale through two Pilot Sites: one in Greece and one in Hungary and will facilitate the large-scale transposition of the methods and contents developed through the creation of a scale-up and replication guide.DIGITALIS gathers 5 partners from 3 Programme Countries (GR, HU and IT), from public and private sectors and with a complementary expertise: biomedical research laboratory and biotechnology innovation centre (Fondazione Democenter-Sipe - DCS, IT, Private Foundation), medical research and health promotion (PROLEPSIS, GR, Research Institute), Technology Enhanced Learning Systems (PROMPT, HU, SME), informal carers network support (EPIONI, GR, national non-profit organization) and Customer Communications Management (CCM) and Digital Customer Experience (DOXEE, IT, SME). DCS and DOXEE have been already involved in a Horizon 2020 project respectively, but it would be the first time in an Erasmus partnership project. They will be fully supported by the rest of the consortium.<< Implementation >>The project will last 36 months (01/01/2022 – 31/12/2024) and 4 Project Results (PR) will be achieved. The methodology applied aims to design a digital needs and assessment scheme, adapted to female informal caregivers (FIC) to allow an adapting mapping and inventory digital health care services and digital skills (PR1– M9), to concretely develop a set of digital training content modules and sessions (PR3 – M29), to develop the e-learning platform to support the test and assessment of digital training content modules and sessions (PR3 – M29) and finally build a replication guide to scale-up the Project Results at the European level (PR4 – M34). The following implementation process will be conducted to reach the project objectives and deliver the planned results. The 4 PRs will enable DIGITALIS to reach the quality objective of the training approach and its adaptability to the specific FICs’ needs, conditions and interest. Each PR definition and implementation will be based on the previous one to ensure the coherence of the project implementation:- PR1 The coordinator DCS will design the common digital healthcare services and skills methodology aiming to assess the FIC’ digital needs. To do so, essential steps will be followed: (i) the elaboration of a digital needs and assessment scheme notably containing a digital needs survey for FICs, (ii) the recruitment of FICs and the assessment of their digital inclusion (equipment/facilities) and digital skills baseline, (iii) the inventory of the digital healthcare services and technologies in the 2 Pilot Sites countries (Greece and Hungary) and an adapted roadmap of digital skills and knowledge to the identified FIC’s needs. This general frame will be the basis content which will enable the development of PR2.- PR2 Based on PR1 outputs, PROLEPSIS will lead the development of a set of digital training content modules and sessions for FICs. The co-creation content development approach, which will involve the active participation of FICs will enable the production of tailored made training modules content which will be translated in English and reviewed. For the skills acquisition evaluation, dedicated scenarios will be designed by PROLEPSIS. Finally, translation and localisation of the learning content into Greek and Hungarian will be also produced within PR2.- PR3 PROMPT will propose several activities that will progressively lead to the development of the e-learning platform to support the test and assessment of the digital training content modules and sessions produced in PR2. A beta version of the e-learning platform will be developed in a first place to enable the integration of the training modules. A continuous optimisation of the platform will be carried on until a final version is delivered at the end of the DIGITALIS project. Within this PR, the mentors will firstly test the platform and the recruited FICs by each Pilot Sites will test and assess the training programme. The development and implementation of the interactive and animated videos to support the dedicated scenarios developed in PR2 for evaluation will be performed by DOXEE. The online course will be completely finalised based on the feedback received from the Pilots.- PR4 DCS will design a Replication Guide plan and produce dedicated material highlighting the main results and lessons learnt. This guide will primarily target similar associations in the EU that would be interested to replicate the DIGITALIS approach. A recipient list will be established during the project to ensure a broader transferability: members of EUROCARERS and the prelisted entities (see associated partners question) will receive direct access to the Replication Guide. This final Project Result will also provide policy recommendations and guidelines for improving the status of informal caregivers and their access to training opportunities in Europe and more largely, adult education programmes at the national and European scales.<< Results >>The key deliverable of the DIGITALIS project is an innovative blended learning approach proposing a modular digital skills training programme with tailored-made content, specifically designed by and for the female informal caregivers according to their national healthcare environment and context. The blended innovative learning approach relies on the co-creation content development method which involves two focus groups (one in Greece and one in Hungary, each composed of a core group of 3 volunteers’ female informal caregivers – 6 in total) who will actively contribute to the entire creation process of the training content. The core subject of the training refers to e-health services used notably by the older adults in their daily life. During the preparation phase, key e-health services categories and associated technologies have been pre-identified. They provide an initial pattern to frame the modular training programme. Those preidentified services and technologies will be finetuned after the digital needs and baseline assessment results analysis (PR1 – M9). It is then scheduled to organise 5 co-creation workshops with the focus groups (1 workshop per module to be created) in both Pilot Sites – 10 workshops in total (half a day each – from M10 to M18). Those workshops will gather the partners in charge of creating and providing the training content and the informal carers associations to structure the online modules content and to ensure that it is in line with the needs of the target group. Following this content development phase, a proof-ready e-learning platform using a Virtual Learning Environment (VLE) Open-Source solution (Moodle) settled in the frame of the Erasmus + Grandis XXI project (to be adapted to the DIGITALIS requirements within PR3) will support the following 5 preidentified modules (to be developed under PR2, modules to be delivered in M20):MODULE 1 – Basic digital skills and competences for caring for older adults (using the DigComp frame) MODULE 2 - Assistive technologies and health related information services MODULE 3 – Self-monitoring and disease management by using ICTMODULE 4 – Digital adherence technologies (smartphone-based technologies, digital pillboxes, etc.)MODULE 5 - Social networks, online communities for active and healthy ageingFrom Module 2 to Module 5, the content will be adapted to the national environment of the 2 Pilot Sites with the main objective to provide learning content combined with digital resources directly related to their national context. The DIGITALIS project will also provide tangible results in the field of Adult Education and Social Inclusion. The consortium aims to reach the following immediate results for at least 20 female informal caregivers who are members of EPIONI in Greece and 30 who are members of Önkéntes Központ Alapítvány (OKA - associated partner) in Hungary (50 in total) involved in the piloting phase:•A digital needs and assessment scheme (based on the DigComp frame) to evaluate the digital skills baseline of 50 informal carers in total;•An adapted mapping of digital healthcare services and technologies to FICs needs in the 2 Pilot countries;•A complete roadmap of digital skills and knowledge adapted to informal caregivers needs (also based on the DigComp frame) in the 2 EU Pilot countries;•5 co-creation workshops for the training content in both Pilot Sites – 10 workshops in total•A five-module digital skills training programme focusing on healthcare services and technologies in the 2 EU Pilot countries;•A thorough e-learning platform capitalizing on previous project developments to support the digital training content modules;•An evaluation frame to assess the digital skills acquisition by informal carers after participating to the programme and based on 5 persona-centred scenarios animated through 3 communication videos. •A replication guide to scale-up the project results at the European level