Pack Services – Espace Senior

Description

Nowadays isolated elderly people don’t dare to call relatives or social services when they are in distress or feeling alone.

Municipality services try to identify these cases but have no efficient way to contact these people.

To be able to trigger a first help (i.e. a simple visit or call for a better understanding of the distress), the municipality wants to install a friendly connected device to allow people to express their current mood.

As part of its missions to identify people at risk, the CCAS (Social Action Center) of Angers is working with La Poste (French postal service company) on experimenting a system of self-reporting with a hundred residents of the city, over 60 years old and residing at home. This connected device will allow isolated people to inform the CCAS of their moods; Data will then be analysed by the CCAS who will trigger, if necessary, the visit of a mail carrier or the intervention of a social service of the community.

This challenge concerns startups which will conceive and produce some prototypes to allow isolated people to publish their daily mood.

These objects must be designed to be user-friendly and with the goal in mind of encouraging a gradual change in behaviour, increasing social contact of isolated senior.

This device mustn’t be too ‘digital’ or ‘sophisticated’ and should be well integrated in the senior environment (usability, design, privacy compliant…);

It should become a daily mood expression device for the senior: “the mood caster” allows a daily mood expression and creates an efficient link between the senior and the social services.

In a future version, the device may include the ability to offer gratification or services to participating senior even in repeated good moods.

Target

This challenge will concern two areas: 

- The city of Angers and, for the first phase, almost one hundred people.
- Secondly if the experiment is successful, we can foresee the deployment of the system all over the country. After this second phase, the solution could be deployed all over the country for all municipalities which want to assist isolated seniors.

For this challenge, our primary target is represented by disadvantaged or isolated elderly people More than 30,000 persons aged over 60 (21 % of the global population), live in Angers. More than 70,000 dependent seniors live in the Pays de la Loire region. This number should clearly increase over the next few decades considering the overall process of population aging. By 2030, the Pays de la Loire could count more than 100,000 elderly and people at risk.

The demographic evolution of seniors requires anticipation of their needs and the offered services.

Competencies

The city of Angers, via its Economic Agency (Aldev), is engaged in a Smart City Project. 

We work with La Poste (French postal service company) to develop innovative services, in the Silver Economy, to improve and extend efficiency of our social services. The purpose is to simplify the social service contact and access in a global approach.

Unfortunately people who never go to the municipal social department are not known by our teams. With this challenge, we hope to involve people who are currently out of our field of vision. By working with La Poste, which knows every person as customer, we will offer a way for isolated people to be linked in a gentle way with the social services department.

Four entities are involved in this challenge :

• Aldev, via its Innovation Department
• Angers Municipality with the social service department
• La Poste – Silver Economy Department
• Docapost, which is a subsidiary of La Poste for innovation and information technologies

Innovation

There is no solution on the market to make it possible to report mood or well-being to social services. There are many warning systems, but only available to people already identified as having 'difficulties’ (risk of falling, sickness, psychic fragility ...). 

We are looking for a tool of everyday life, which can be given to elderly people, and reassure them by providing a reactive service if necessary. It must be simple, and designed to gently familiarize seniors with digital technologies. The collection of moods isn’t possible without digital technology.

Indeed it takes too long time to visit isolated persons to regularly pick their current mood. Less intrusive than phone, a digital connected device seems to be more relevant and more suitable for a daily mood collection.

Commitment

The project is a multiparty partnership with: 

- The involvement of mail carriers for the distribution of the systems,
- Home intervention of qualified mail carriers
- The social Centre of the city
- The IT company Docapost (subsidiary of La Poste)
- The Innovation Department of Angers Loire development
- A panel of senior citizens selected from the target neighbourhoods to help design a suitable solution.

The project team is made with 8-people/persons currently following the project.

Compliance

The challenge complies 100% with the ethical standards of the project agreement.