# Senior Living Lab: An Ecological Approach to Foster Social Innovation in an Ageing Society
## 1 Introduction  
We live in an ageing society where the increasing older population depends on the shrinking working-age population. The EUROPOP2013 study estimates that in the EU the demographic old-age dependency ratio (people aged 65 or above relative to those aged 15-64) will increase from 27.8% in 2013 to 50.1% in 2060. Therefore, the EU would move from having four working-age people for every person aged over 65 years to only two working-age people [1]. This will have an important economic impact on the healthcare and pension systems. In this context, it is crucial to promote initiatives for ageing well, supporting prevention and healthy lifestyles. The EU has supported several campaigns to promote ageing well, in particular through information and communication technology research, during the 7 th Framework Programme and the Horizon 2020 (H2020) program, but also with dedicated programs, such as the Active and Assisted Living (AAL) Programme. Making successful innovation for older adults hides several challenges that have to be addressed from the onset of the research project. For at least two decades, it has been advocated that individual behavior change is not sufficient in order to ensure an effective improvement of older adults' health [2]. An ecological action, i.e., a change also in the environment of the individual is often needed to supportthe promotion of healthy lifestyles and ensure their effectiveness [2]. This implies a change not only in infrastructure, but also to the existing supporting communities, policy-makers, healthcare professionals and business actors. This approach obtained good results for promoting older adults' health in France and Quebec [3]. In this context, the older adults as individuals still have an important role, since their needs should be well understood and they should be implicated, contributing throughout whole design processes of new products, services and practices. The Senior Living Lab [4; 5] aims at promoting healthy ageing at home and strives to innovate for and with older adults through transdisciplinary research, creating products and services that can not only meet the functional requirements for which they have been developed, but that are also appealing, easy to use and affordable. Exploiting an ecological approach, the Senior Living Lab (SLL) conducts community-based participatory research in the French-speaking part of Switzerland (Romandy) with a transdisciplinary team. The core of the Senior Living Lab is constituted by four academic partners with different areas of experience: business, design, engineering and nursing within the University of Applied Sciences and Arts Western Switzerland. Working together, these four domains allow the academic platform to tackle the challenges of co-creating with older adults, adhering to an ecological approach. Moreover, this academic core is reinforced by companies, associations and institutions willing to innovate in-tandem with older adults. In this article, we aim to provide an overview of the key methodologies that are important for discussing the transdisciplinary approach and the role of technologies in a living lab for older adults, which is our main contribution. In light of this purpose, this article has the two-fold goal of: (1) presenting the transdisciplinary methodologies needed to design a living lab for older adults (highlighting the activities and interventions carried out during the first year of life of the laboratory) and the impact that they have in the functioning of the living lab; (2) discussing the role of ICTs when co-creating with older adults. Indeed, while on the one hand, the ICTs have the potential of improving the quality of life of older adults, on the other hand, older adults are often concerned by the potential negative impacts of ICTs on their lives.