Focus aims at reducing drastically the burden of fragility in the ageing of Europe, among women of these age. They want to achieve scalability through the development of methodologies and tools to assist in the early diagnosis, detection and management of fragility (http://www.focus-aha.eu/).

Focus activities include the development of an innovative programme of health promotion in women. The aim is to reduce the gender digital divide that exists in the current society. Digital technology (mobile phones and social network) has been used to improve interest in a programme of physical activity.  The overall assessment included physical parameters (weight, height, waist measurement, BMI, blood pressure); biochemical (cholesterol, triglycerides, glycaemia); motors (strength); psychocognitive (memory, quality of life, level of social activities, mood); habits (smoking, alcohol and food consumption). 


Team Focus said that until now “there were insufficient data about how was the diet of Valencian women. Consequently, elements as the intake of calcium were not known. For this reason, our intervention is the first of many initiatives of the health field that represents results in an overall assessment”. 


Regarding technology, Focus has a website (http://www.salusvitae.es/) updated periodically with news of interest to women of the project (mainly related to health topics, such as coffee consumption, how combat insomnia, among others). Also they have a Facebook page and Whatsapp account for spreading news that have been published in the website, in order to empower them. Furthermore, Whatsapp is used as a tool to create virtual network among participants with the intention of closer relations with each other, and consequently increase the participation to physical exercise. 


In order to improve the use of this technology, they have organised computer courses (offered by cybervolunteers) to reduce the digital divide and in that way, promoting the use of social network. In these courses, participants have been fragmented in small groups to put in place a strategy designed to arrive at broad strata of population.

As they have concluded, physical exercise improves physical and psychological conditions. Improvement, in general, is noted after practising physical exercise during three months. “It is possible that, in the long term, improvements will be even more significant. It is also noted that offering training courses in new technologies achieves a small but significant increase of knowledge in the use of technology. Therefore, digital divide is reduced and the use of social networks among participants is improved. This would lead to an improved hooking to physical exercise”, claim.