Care 4 Balance

Partners, family members, close relatives, friends who are providing care as non-professionals (i.e. ‘informal carers’) are often emotionally involved in the wellbeing and safety of the elderly person with a care need (i.e. ‘older adult’). While this ensures the motivation of the informal carer to do the maximum for the beloved one, it can result in overprotection of the older adult, leading to a too fast increase of dependency. At the same time it often leads to endangering the physical and mental wellbeing of the informal carer itself. Taken into account that formal care delivery is re-structuring itself towards personalized/on-demand care, informal carers should be able to delegate certain care tasks at the point and time of need. A balanced ecosystem in which informal and formal care strengthen and complement each other seems likely to be the only sustainable care model for the ageing society where ICT enabled platforms can offer efficient ways to manage this system. C4B will do on-demand and multi-stakeholder service design based on dashboard systems representing the status & context of the actors involved. The dashboard is an always-on interactive device (‘interactive photo frame’) that is easy to use for older adults, and will be used to show status information and to enable communication and coordination. The information will be collected through user-generated input and/or contextual sensor data. The back end system will detect & analyze care demands and/or cumbersome situations. The system envisages improved and sustainable care provision by informal carers, optimized cooperation with formal carers and QoL improvement for the older aldult. The dashboard outperforms traditional solutions in terms of adoption and ease-of-use. This project aims to build a business case based on the dashboard proposition.