Annual Meeting
The STAGE partners gathered in Frascati, near Rome, Italy, from the 21st to the 23rd of April 2026, for our Bi-Annual Consortium and General Assembly Meeting. Over three days, we reflected on progress against our key expected outputs and what still needs to be done.
Hosted by our partner Tor Vergata University of Rome, the meeting provided the opportunity to meet in person in a beautiful setting at Villa Mondragone.
Villa Mondragone
To kick the meeting off, the Project Coordinator, the University of Oulu, introduced an icebreaker inspired by a game played at Finnish weddings, ‘The shoe game’ (kenkäleikki in Finnish). Partners were asked a series of questions and had to hold up a shoe if it applied to them. Luckily, unlike in kenkäleikki, where the bride and groom hold up each other’s shoes, we got to keep our own!
Villa Mondragone
On the first day, we focused on the tools being developed, including the Age-Friendly Neighbourhood Atlas, Trustworthy and Robust Artificial Intelligence Tools, Integrative Care Platform and the Healthy Ageing Intelligence Platform. We opened the meeting with a viewing of our new project video and ended the day with the launch of the STAGE Healthy Ageing Lab to partners. The Lab is an online space where STAGE’s research comes to life; a space where you can learn, explore, and engage interactively with the knowledge generated.
The second day saw the focus switch to the scientific progress on multi-morbidity and biological hallmarks of ageing, data usage and analysis, and ended with an update on the impact seen so far, including policy.
On the final day of the meeting, our consortium either attended the Ageing Deal Conference in the centre of Rome or stayed in Frascati for two consortium workshops about policy and embedded ethics.
Embedded Ethics workshop facilitated by the Technical University of Munich. Closest in the picture are some of the Work Package 2 team members.
Ageing Deal Conference
The Ageing Deal Conference, which we hosted alongside our sister projects COMFORTage and SmILE, brought together European projects, experts and policymakers to address one of the most pressing societal challenges: how to support healthier, more equitable, inclusive and sustainable ageing across Europe.
The morning sessions involved presentations from keynote speakers and panel discussions, which focused on policy and innovation. In the afternoon, each of the three projects ran interactive workshops, which enabled innovative approaches such as patient digital twins to be tested, and allowed information to be gathered to further understand the digital barriers faced by older adults.
STAGE partners, the University of Barcelona (UB), the University of Oulu (UOULU) and SRDC, supported by Beta Technology (Beta), held three workshops to explore stakeholders’ views about understanding, trusting and using AI risk prediction results to help prevent ageing with multi-morbidity. These co-creative sessions, using a persona approach, asked attendees to identify both enablers and obstacles to promote the usability and explainability of AI risk prediction models. The resulting feedback will be used to inform the design of the STAGE AI risk prediction models and decision support tool for clinicians.
Pictured at the Ageing Deal Conference from left to right: Jo Boulding (Beta), Erika Jarva (UOULU), Álvaro Rodrigo Passi Solar (UB) and Gokce Banu Laleci Erturkmen (SRDC).
Stakeholders at the Ageing Deal Conference, STAGE workshop.
