According to the EU’s 2012 ‘Ageing’ report, it is estimated that we will see Europe’s population of people over 65 increase from 17 per cent to 30 per cent. Clearly, this will present major challenges in terms of both economic, social and health-related issues for all EU countries. This issue is also on the agenda in the UK social housing sector because due to people living longer, care and support needs will increase.
Aareon is the technical partner in the istay@home project. This is a project that aims to investigate how information technology can be used to support elderly and disabled people to stay in their own homes, and face challenges such as isolation, mobility, health and wellbeing, security and independence.
The project consists of nine housing providers, two universities and four technology companies from the UK, France, Belgium, Germany and The Netherlands. Part-funded by the European Regional Development Fund, the istay@home project has been divided into four phases which I will describe below. The project concludes in 2015, and consideration is being given to the commercialisation of the resulting technologies following the pilot phase.
Phase one of the project was an information gathering exercise which involved gathering a list of the challenges that older and disabled tenants face on a daily basis and their views on how they felt technology might be able to help them in their daily lives and mitigate some of those challenges. This phase was carried out with tenants from the participating housing providers. The key issues that they raised were: to remain independent in their homes; and that they felt increasingly isolated from their relatives and their communities.
And it was primarily these issues that drove the technological and practical aspects of the project. It was found that in all participating housing providers, intensive support was required from staff to help the residents overcome their fear of technology devices and the internet in general, and in some cases, relatives and carers were involved in the induction process.
Phase two of the project involved the evaluation of IT solutions which could be used to form a technology platform. However, one interesting aspect of the project was that, at the end of this phase, a catalogue of affordable products was gathered – a core IT platform capable of running on any device, for use by the tenant, which is also capable of linking to a wide variety of assistive products such as communicative scales, blood-pressure monitors, fall-alert watches, lighting and heating controllers, energy monitors and a GPS-based person locating tool.
In all, over 100 suppliers took part in the evaluation phase of the project and a catalogue of products has been defined from this exercise. Also key to this phase was finding IT devices that tenants felt comfortable using, such as tablet PCs, and what infrastructure needs their properties had, such as viable broadband connections.
Phase three of the project involved training tenants in the new technologies, and real-world testing of the IT platform and the product catalogue in tenants’ homes. 200 tenants from five countries took part in the testing phase, which lasted for 12 months and concluded in 2014. Each housing provider chose the products that it felt would have the greatest impact on the sample group of tenants. The general finding was a low technical ability within the tenant group, but a high interest in the concept and the products.
The IT platform for istay@home was developed for the pilot by Aareon, and comprises two parts. First, a tenant portal which is delivered to any device via the internet. Optimised to adapt to any screen size, the application requires the tenant to log in and enter their password. Then, a menu enables the tenant to access various services at any time of day or night. Profile information such as their telephone number, email address and other details can be viewed and edited. Any service can be requested from their housing provider via an intuitive menu-based method, including repair requests for their home. Available devices can be shown, requested and then connected via the portal – for example the ‘smart’ devices shown above – and the portal then facilitates connection and data sharing to and from these devices so, for example, if a certain figure is registered by a connected blood pressure monitor, an alert can be sent to a previously-chosen healthcare professional.
What is interesting about the portal is the creation of an exclusive ‘social networking’ tool, on the basis that the network might be relatives, or residents living in the tenant’s block of flats. Residents can then communicate with external contacts or one another by private messaging or video chat, whenever they want, facilitating a community-building approach. Finally, a ‘sharing’ function enables contacts to share video, image and document files with one another – for example, a tenant could receive photographs from a relative from their holidays without having to use the wider internet which many tenants said they were nervous about using. Interestingly, many tenants not only mastered the technology but began asking for more functions and submitting ideas for enhancements to the platform.
Also core to the software platform is the cloud-based ‘administration’ portal which is used by the participating housing providers’ staff to create and manage users of the platform, to receive requests for services and repairs (and optionally interface this to their housing management system), and to manage any workflow processes that may be triggered by data received from any connected ‘smart’ devices in tenants’ homes.
Finally, phase four of the project, which finishes in 2015, will be the publication of the refined catalogue of assisted-living products and the software solution to a web portal to make them generally available to the housing sector and tenants throughout the EU. This phase of the project is currently ongoing, and considerable interest is already being generated from the relevant countries.
On 25 June 2015, the full results of the evaluation phase and an overall assessment of the istay@home project will be given at a conclusion meeting in Brussels. The resulting software and technology catalogue will then be made available for wider consumption.
Paul O’Reilly is a senior consultant at Aareon.
