Nestling Technology between Life-Enhancing Environments and Caring Community Services

Current approaches to managing the well-being and care needs of our growing ageing population are unsustainable. By shifting the balance from acute and long term settings towards independent living in their own environments, it may be possible to improve outcomes while at the same time to decrease overall health costs for ageing people in the long term. Funding a successful transition to a ‘smart home - smart care’ model requires public policy commitment, which in turn requires a strong evidence base to underpin policy decision-making. This paper discusses a multi-agency collaborative project in the North East of Ireland, currently in its inception phase. The project’s goal is to increase and accelerate the opportunity for ageing and frail people in our community to have safe, comfortable, fulfilling and stimulating lives in their own homes. The project focus is to establish a scaleable framework for developing an evidence base, built around a comparative analysis of a demonstrator project alongside a control sample using existing models of care.