Francesco Palmese

I am an Internal Medicine physician with clinical and research expertise in aging, frailty, multimorbidity, sarcopenia, physical function, and digital health.

I am an Adjunct Professor of Internal Medicine at the University of Bologna and an affiliated researcher at the Aging Research Center of Karolinska Institutet in Stockholm, within the Multimorbidity and Frailty in Older Adults research group.

I graduated in Medicine and Surgery from the University of Naples Federico II in 2013 and completed my specialist training in Internal Medicine at the University of Bologna in 2019. In 2025, I obtained a PhD in Health and Technology from the University of Bologna. My doctoral research focused on innovative approaches to frailty, including the use of wearable technologies for continuous monitoring and fall-risk assessment in older adults.

Since February 2020, I have worked at the Internal Medicine Unit for Frailty and Ageing at Ravenna Hospital, AUSL della Romagna. I am also involved in postgraduate medical training and coordinate the unit’s outpatient ultrasound activities.

I am the Principal Investigator of DARE-FALLSPREDICT, a multicentre study investigating wearable-based fall-risk assessment and prevention in community-dwelling older adults.

Within the European Geriatric Medicine Society, I serve as Secretary of the Special Interest Group on Gerontechnology and Digital Health and co-lead its Wearables and Apps subgroup. I am also involved in European collaborative initiatives focusing on artificial intelligence, digital health, frailty, and geriatric point-of-care ultrasound.

My current research focuses on multimorbidity and physical-function trajectories, blood-based and digital biomarkers of ageing, wearable-derived measures of sleep and mobility, and point-of-care ultrasound in geriatric care.

Main research fields:

• Frailty, multimorbidity, and multidimensional health assessment in older adults
• Sarcopenia, physical performance, and long-term functional trajectories
• Digital biomarkers and wearable technologies for personalised health maintenance and disease prevention
• Fall-risk assessment, prediction, and prevention
• Sleep and circadian patterns in ageing
• Point-of-care ultrasound in internal and geriatric medicine
• Prognostic models in older and medically complex patients