InAbled Cities consortium

From January 2021 to June 2023, the InAbled Cities project developed practical and innovative tools to overcome the barriers that discourage physical activity in cities to create and improve opportunities to enable people with disabilities and older people to be physically active in day-to-day live.

The Europe Region’s role in InAbled Cities was to provide technical coordination and quality assurance, making sure that the physiotherapy perspective was always present throughout the project. Additionally, the Europe Region led the dissemination actions of the project which main target were the European physiotherapy community, health stakeholders and policy makers at EU level.

The Europe Region and the rest of the members of the InAbled Cities consortium worked alongside physiotherapy HEIs and Member Organisations to meet the project’s objectives. AIFI (Italy) and AEF (Spain) contributed to ensure a scientific high quality of the four project’s Intellectual Outputs.

The project’s partners produced 4 Intellectual Outputs:

1. The Practical Intervention Methodology (PIM) gathers tips and recommendations, as well as specific exercises, to promote physical activity among older and physically disabled people using urban environments and infrastructures. This document was drafted by experts from ONCE School of Physiotherapy (Spain) and Radboud University Medical Center (Netherlands). The exercises contained in the PIM were performed by the project target groups (namely people with disabilities and older people) and supervised by physiotherapists during the two rounds of pilot physical activity actions in the municipalites of Bologna (Italy), a densely populated urban area, and Sevilla la Nueva (Spain), a small urban area. This allowed partners to test their methodology in different contexts and to develop recommendations for its further use.

   
   

   PIM document is available in English, Italian and Spanish to facilitate replication by other practitioners in other urban areas after the project’s lifetime.

2. The Citizens Engagement Strategy (CES) provides communication methodologies and tools for the engagement of older people and citizens with disabilities in the project. It takes into consideration older people’s and people with disabilities’ needs, which strengthens the objective of their participation in exercise activities and provides more awareness among physiotherapists.

   
   

   CES is available in English. A shortened version of the document is available in English, Italian and Spanish to facilitate the implementation of the recommendations.

3. The partners of the project developed a prototype of a mobile “InAbled Cities App” to provide support to the project’s target groups willing to practice physical activity in urban areas, and for physiotherapists willing to encourage physical activity among this target group. The App provides users with different sorts of information and facilities such as video guidelines of physical activity exercises (developed in the PIM and adapted for different types of conditions), informative tips, recommendations… The InAbled Cities Prototype App was developed for Android and iOS. To have access to the iOS version, please first download TestFlight, and then click here to download the App.

   
   

4. The Intervention’s Final Evaluation Report combines all the lessons learnt throughout the InAbled Cities project lifetime as well as the conclusions and recommendations for potential future interventions.

On 26th April 2023, the InAbled Cities consortium organised the project’s Final Conference at the European Parliament to present the main achievements of the InAbled Cities project. The recording of the event is available on the Europe Region’s Youtube channel.

Find out more about InAbled Cities and the Intellectual Outputs here.

The outcomes of InAbled Cities encourage awareness and further research among physiotherapists on the role of physiotherapy towards improving the quality of life of older people and people living with disabilities.