ROD: Not at All Michelle and Thank You for Inviting Me and for Your Patience and for Allowing

ROD: Not at all Michelle and thank you for inviting me and for your patience and for allowing me to access over Skype. I am a bit anxious about the band width we have available on this side so I hope you are hearing me okay but I have had to turn off the video on this side. I'm also not in control of pressing the slides going forwards so I think Owen has kindly agreed to nudge them forward every time I say the word "next." So I am going to start by saying "next".

So just briefly who we are. We work with Dublin agencies, institutes and industry really around developing new ideas that enhance the quality of life and wellbeing of older people and those who care for them and we work at three levels through integrating more community oriented services. More sustainable home and neighbourhood design and more effective friendly technologies.

So we really do work on the intervention of quality of life, quality of service and quality of environment. So I think our role could be involved in all of the workshops this afternoon but I'm thrilled to be here on this one looking at ICT.

I suppose the focus of my presentation for the next few minutes will be exploring some of the learnings that are emerging from our housing innovation project at the Great Northern Haven in Dundalk which is a community model for smart age friendly housing.

The aspect of that project is a new role in the community which is a role that helps older people help themselves. It's an example of the local authority and HSE working together on both housing care and technology. Ergonomics dealing with some of the lifetime adaptability and universal design aspects and also ecology and design sustainability footprint but the piece I would like to concentrate on this afternoon would be on the ICT side which is the connections for wellbeing.

Before I delve into the technology I wanted to highlight a major trend that we're dealing with which can be characterised as a shift to the left. And we're seeing older people in a lot of different places and engaging with lots of different care levels. Varying from independence to varying levels of dependency and locations from being in the home and community settings and through to long term care.

And I suppose some of the thinking that we're seeing or tackling issues in isolation around the home, declining functional status and the confidence and concerns with mobility and falling. And I suppose that the care level issues around cognitive decline, how we use the respite services and multiple chronic diseases and we're really looking at how ICT impacts and intervenes in these areas to try and push our care to the left.

When we look at connectivity we have seen a range of different dimensions. So along this red axis we can look at technology that's helping connect people in terms of their social and informal connectivity. Issues around safety and security, social connection and civic and social participation but going along the blue axis is more connectivity with the health system whether it's around vital signs, self-management and remote consultation.

I suppose the one that's really interesting to us all is this area of context awareness and moving ICT systems from being previously reactive to events becoming more preventive and ideally more predictive. So we're looking at systems moving from the quick flash between the world is green and the world is red into proactively engaging with risk and I suppose managing the orange zone and looking at solutions in that space.

There are many, many terminologies used to describe the systems that span this landscape and I think a particular characteristic is the extent to which the person at home is in control or autonomous and whether or not their accessing services either directly or indirectly through call centres.

So we get things like telecare and telehealth and telemedicine and some of them are going to call centres and some of them are dealing with services directly and we need to be able to navigate this landscape and look at approaches and services that are spanning these.

I suppose the other thing that I'm particularly interested in there is a couple of slides here based on the work at the Centre for Future Health in New York, and I suppose, they highlight maybe what we might have seen as some of the current measures that we look at around vital signs, whether it's blood pressure or weight or respiration and some of the supports that these measures provide to some of these disease associated with older age.

I think what we're seeing is the opportunity for technology to be able to open up a whole new range of measures that move from vital signs to signs of vitality, trying to get underneath our patterns of exercise and patterns of nutrition or general activity patterns around the home, issues around engaging sleeping patterns these are all measures which are very informative around how we might be able to manage many of the chronic diseases that we're facing but also help us self-manage our conditions going forward.

Our project in Dundalk is very centred on contact awareness and how we can use smart technology to help inform us about how we're getting on and to help us self-manage the situation and our conditions. Our apartments have a lot of centres and activators but I suppose the critical thing is that they are auto corrected on to a common infrastructure in the home. This allows us to aggregate the data.

This is allows us to aggregate data from a lot of different sources, sort it, analyse it and feed it back as service or intervention that can help us either directly to the occupant or if agreed with the occupant, shared to other family members and survivors. This work is ongoing but it allows us to collaborate in several different ways.

So Owen if you press return three times you will see three cohorts of people we work with. Ones that are dealing with data acquisition, universals and colleges dealing with data analysis and then service delivery organisations where we can bring this data back to the individual or through to older people and other services.

The next couple of slides will just give you some early visualisations of some of kind of data we're bringing through, so these are clock cloths. So they are a little bit like the rings on a tree starting at the centre and working out wards. So we're looking at 60 days’ worth of data here and midnight at the top zero, zero and noon at the bottom. So each circle is a day and we're seeing 60 days aggregated there and it's giving us a picture of a person's movement and routines in the home.

So you are getting a sense of their time in the living room and kitchen and bedrooms and ensuites and one of the things you will see here, this person is living a reasonably normal pattern but their night time is broken up by getting up and going to the kitchen a lot. You can see a lot of those blue dots and this is the kind of information we can bring back in and see people's diets or night time eating patterns and maybe we can do things to help people improve that.

This is longer term data and we're comparing two people from the homes and we're looking there as and the their time spent outside of home. So we're looking there at around six months of data. Each at a weekend. You are seeing starkly the levels of engagement and getting out and about between somebody who is quite activity and somebody who is got a depression and who tends to be inside very much.

What is interesting here is the extent to which we're able to use, so these would be standard present sensors in your home and some contact sensors, to be able to buildup a picture of activity and lifestyle and to be able to bring this back and work with people to see how their interventions and supports that we might be able to do to help change this. And clearly a lot of the work we're doing in trying to build up confidence in these detections and improve interventions.

I think just the last couple of things I would like to touch on. One is, this is really trying to get a focus on the role of user involvement. The commission did a survey a few years ago to see what was some of the barriers to these technologies and while things like patents and standards and regulations and scattered evidence were all issues, the non-involvement of end users is a critical dimension in being able to bring forward these kinds of systems and services so they meet end user needs and can fit into their lifestyles and patterns.

And I think it's one of the key things and I know it's a key mantra from the National Disability Authority and it's vital how we maximize user involvement in the development of products and services.

The last slide I am going to apologise for in advance because it does buildup a little bit of complexity but it's worth touching on some of the challenges around funding and how do we see some of these types of systems and services getting addressed going forward. This slide lays out three groups of housing setting. So on the lefthand side more of the mainstream housing and specialise housing in the middle and more formalised settings on the righthand side.

I am not overall thrilled with that particular picture because I think universal design would have a wider remit and wouldn't only be linked into mainstream house. I think it could be spread out to how it supports principles across a wider range. But I think you get the idea that here in Ireland, we have a lot of mainstream settings but we're very thin on the ground in relation to some of our specialized housing and other models of housing where some of these technologies make come alive.

Part of this is around how do we see these markets growing and where will the funding come from? And we have funding come inning from two directions. The fair deal in relation the formal nursing care and home supports and home care packages come inning on the more mainstream models.

We have also got different sources in relation to capital, whether or not it's the Department of Environment or local authorities and the Department of Health and the HSE. I think the thing we have got is how might we be able to resource some of the technologies coming into the middle sphere and some of the options we need to look at are around is it around enhancing home support packages?

Is it loosening up the fair deal or some form of pooling? Is it insurance or is it a wider consumer market or is it some combination of all three? But I'm conscious that we have market barriers towards the take of some of these technologies and I think it's one of the things we need to address.

So I suppose my final question is really, can we develop a viable social market to simulate these innovations and bring them into a way that can sustain growth and enhance quality of life for people in their homes and the quality of services going forward.

Just so say first of all thank you very much for allowing me to come in, remotely in this presentation and for being there with you virtually. I think for me the smart agenda is all around connecting and empowering and I hope if you were able to are hear me from that side, some of the Skype technology might be a good example of how we might be able to do that. So thank you very much.