Persons with certain functional impairments have a busy schedule, with many different people coming in and out of their lives to support, assist or just to hang out.
It can be assistants that wants to set a date and time on when to go grocery shopping or book a doctor’s appointment. Family that wants to make dinner plans or maybe the individual just want to plan some activities with friends or other associations in their life.
How do all these activities come together?
How is the planning and coordination taking place?
We have identified a gap in this part of these individuals’ lives.
The assistants that work with them and should help with the coordination are having too much to do themselves that the processes that are established are hard to follow.
An example from everyday life:
A mother wants to schedule a visit to her sons living facilities. She calls the dedicated phone number to the assistants at his residence, an assistant that is on call picks up.
Mother: “I have talked to my son and he is ok with me coming to visit on Sunday, but he is uncertain if he is available. Can you check his schedule?”
Assistant: “Sounds nice. I will check his schedule; it is located in his apartment, so I have to go there when I have a minute to spare”
As you can see, the assistant is occupied with something else when the mother, in this case, calls.
What if the assistant forgets to look at the son’s schedule and there is no booking made? Or she finally has the time and checks the schedule, maybe there is a booking already made? Then she needs to call the mother again and try to book another date and time. But then the son is not involved in the booking.
At the moment the communication is held without the involvement of the son himself. The assistant would then need to wait for the son to come home and try to schedule again. This is time-consuming and inefficient for all parties.
What if we could find a solution that could help the son schedule his own activities but still involve all parts of his lives that needs to know about it, to make it a success?
We have an idea to create a solution that can unify scheduling, communication and other needs in connection to the coordination of a person with certain functional impairments life.
Our motivation is to create a better everyday life for these individuals, their relatives and assistants. To reduce the misunderstandings, double bookings and frustration that this can cause. Instead create transparency and trust among all people involved. And the most important thing of all, that the individual will gain the feeling of control of their life and independence.
Our findings of similar research:
Tieto – Lifecare application
We have found out that Tieto have started to work on a similar solution. The details on the website are vague. The name of their service will be Lifecare, and their main purpose will be information and the flow of it to increase transparency in care. It seems to be more geared towards the processing and managing of the individuals needs in the context of applications to government instances and medical records in their care. The idea is to gather all the relevant information in one place, also so the caregivers and the patient in question can follow it all.
Where it differs from our idea is that our primary focus is the scheduling of the patients day to day activities and be a platform where all three participants (the patient, the family and the caregiver) and see and partake in said scheduling.
Medical reports and healthcare
The below articles are touching on the subjects but are mostly targeting the medical reports and healthcare.
In South Korea there is a system invented by Gang Kyung-Sook Wan (2009), for life care services through an integrated site, which unifies different agencies associated with visited nursing services, the user of the services, the city and district, billing agencies and National Insurance Corporations which also privide visited care. The aim of this is to provide optimal, quick and accurate life care services to the users.
The integrated site uses a communication network to access a service provider terminal which delegates servicces, connects to servers and terminals holding the user’s scheduling and history, servers for the billing agency and information about the service provider. Through the integrated site everything is connected and visits can be requested and given notification, store information about the visiting service when it occurs and charge for the costs of it.
This article discusses the life care services related to elders who depend on nursing visists and does not directly relate to our product, but has a similar approach in connecting different parties to optimize everyday services for the users.
Furthermore, in 2010, Gershon Gabel published research about a system for managing and processing data between several different entities related to a patient or client – using terminals and area network interfaces. The aim of the research is to enable communication between entities involving patients where at least one of the entities involved in the communication is a doctor.
I.e if a work place injury occurs, the patient selects a doctor through the terminal, and one or more entities are selected to service the patient. The patient also makes financial claims and has an attorney. The area network interface can collect data and send it to the attorney’s interface. The selected doctor can also through the network be provided with the necessary information regarding the patient, which the attorney has received. I.e the attorney can receive information on if the patient’s ability to work has been affected by the workplace injury in any way. Currently there is a lack of electronic communication between the entities involved and they also do not occur in real time. This results in inefficient and slow addressing of the patient’s medical needs and financial claims related to their issue.
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