Village Landais Alzheimer, village that allows autonomy of people with Alzheimer

Publications Bank of innovations

Village Landais Alzheimer, village that allows autonomy of people with Alzheimer

Village Landais Alzheimer Public Interest Group

Imatge from Ehpadia website.

Residential complex with 105 people suffering from Alzheimer’s with a high degree of independence.

It is a small village designed exclusively to allow people with this disease to live autonomously, away from socio-sanitary centres and without the constant support of their relatives. Each inhabitant pays 24,000 euros per year and lives in a family-like house, despite sharing with other residents common spaces such as shops and a theater room. Sociosanitary care, on the other hand, is guaranteed by a group of professionals working there, as well as volunteers working in activities to promote the socialization of the residents.

The village is also a resource center for medical and therapeutic research, as studies are conducted there to assess the results and impacts of this innovative residential model.

Village Landais Alzheimer

e-NABLE, network of 10,000 volunteers making prosthesis with 3D printers

Publications Bank of innovations

e-NABLE, network of 10,000 volunteers making prosthesis with 3D printers

e-NABLE

Image from Enable the future Instagram profile

Online community of 10,000 people worldwide who voluntarily use their 3D printers to create hand and arm prostheses for adults and children who need it.

Individuals and organizations who wish to collaborate with the cause access the web to find users from more than 100 countries who need a prosthetic and have posted photographs showing and explaining the required prosthetic. The voluntary, then, contacts this person, downloads all the necessary information from the website, and adapts the available designs, which are in open source and free of rights, to the specific need of the person who will benefit. Once the prosthesis is printed, the voluntary person disinterestedly forwards it to the final beneficiary, who often lives in another country or continent.

In this way, through domestic manufacturing technology, people with low resources who cannot access a prosthetic because of their high price and/or the need to adapt them to children’s growth can have a free and customised prosthetic.
As an online portal, each can connect with people demanding from all over the world, although also can easily find plaintiffs living nearby and deliver the prosthetic to them personally.

e-NABLE

WACS, automated and massive call service to vulnerable people

Publications Bank of innovations

WACS, automated and massive call service to vulnerable people

Hampshire County Council, PA Consulting

Picture from sabinevanerp on Pixabay

Service that makes automated calls to vulnerable people who are in their home and cannot attend social and health care centres on a regular basis or cannot receive close attention.

When a person who needs to be cared for is detected, the person receives an automated call with a voice from a real person, who asks him about his welfare state and possible needs. If the user needs to receive home care or if someone makes the purchase, for example, the system passes the call to a professional to specify the response to their demand.

This service used artificial intelligence techniques and was implemented in 2020 in the face of the inability of the Hampshire (England) government to monitor carefully and consistently vulnerable people during the COVID-19 pandemic. Due to the need to quickly contact thousands of people who were isolated in their homes, the PA Consulting company developed this massive, automated contact system to cater for and fuel a large volume of calls.

Bringing Ingenuity to Life

Mentoria Social, mentoring for vulnerable young people to promote social inclusion

Publications Bank of innovations

Mentoria Social, mentoring for vulnerable young people to promote social inclusion

Coordinadora Mentoria Social

Picture from “Projecte Rossinyol”, a study that analyzes the impact of mentoring on migrant teenagers. / APPlying Mentoring

Platform of organizations that develop mentoring projects for young people and other vulnerable groups.

Coordinadora Mentoria Social, comprised of 11 partner entities and 8 member entities, brings into contact mentors with people at risk of social exclusion, mainly young people. With the aim of ensuring social cohesion and equal opportunities, the mentor is a voluntary person who is assigned a person to offer him or her their knowledge and experience.

In this way, both people share a few hours a week that enable mentoring to overcome labor, social, academic, etc. due to mentoring support and guidance.

Coordinadora Mentoria Social, through the formations it offers, also works to promote a quality mentoring model in the field of social action.

Coordinadora Mentoria Social

TippyTalk, a solution for people with a verbal disability to communicate

Publications Bank of innovations

TippyTalk, a solution for people with a verbal disability to communicate

TippyTalk

Kids using TippyTalk on a tablet. Picture taken from TippyTalk website.

Application that allows people with nonverbal autism to express themselves through images representing elements of everyday life. By choosing different icons, they can decide who they want to talk with – their mother or father, for example – and tell them what they need, how they feel or what draws their attention. Parents, or the caregiver, receive a text message that allows them to understand what the person with autism cannot explain by words.

The person who takes care of someone with autism can download the app from the App Store or Play Store, and create several items that will be chosen by the person who uses it. These can be your own photos, drawings or any image, and anyone doing this will also be able to write the text that you will receive via SMS according to the selected items. For example, when a fridge is pressed, it means that the person is hungry. In addition, you can also typeset a sound or a word that sounds each time an item is selected.

Currently, the application is only available in English, although you can change settings to put the words in any language. In terms of subscription, TippyTalk is a paid application, but they offer 14 days of free trial.

TippyTalk

Helpper, people with support needs connect with people willing to help them

Publications Bank of innovations

Helpper, people with support needs connect with people willing to help them

Helpper

Young helpper helping an elderly woman to do groceries. Retrieved from Helpper’s website.

Service that connects people who need some support for their daily life tasks (helppies), with people close to them, in the same neighbourhood or village, who are willing to help them (helppers).

Helppper is a model that seeks the comfort of both sides, because it allows helppers to specify what their availability is (schedule, types of service they can offer, if they offer it free or with remuneration, etc.); and the helppies to select the support to be received (what person, for which support needs, schedule, modality, price, etc.). Helpper offers three subscription modalities: Basic, Standard and Premium, to make it easier for each person to personify the level of assistance they want to receive.

People with disabilities, with chronic diseases, elderly people, parents and mothers who are very busy, and even carers who need help in caring for dependents, can access the service.

The types of assistance or possible tasks to offer/receive include: small home repairs; food aid; support with administrative processes; travel and transport support; company to mitigate unwanted loneliness; babysitting; etc.

The service is available in French and Dutch.

Helpper

InvisiCare, monitoring without sensors of the homes of the elderly

Publications Bank of innovations

InvisiCare, monitoring without sensors of the homes of the elderly

JDC-Eshel

Old woman accompanied by her granddaughter. Retrieved from InvisiCare’s website.

A proactive, preventive and community technology system to support older people and their families in a non-invasive, secure, autonomous and community-integrated way. Use the collected encrypted data to detect unexpected patterns or behaviours that require family, social or health intervention. And through artificial intelligence, it warns whoever is relevant. This will help to prevent situations that may pose a long-term problem. In addition to this preventative aspect, it also has a proactive one, since through an App and through a network of communities and accompaniment it provides active and permanent support to the elderly, from the family, the community and public social and health services.

The InvisiCare technology is not invasive as it does not use appliances, does not need contact with people, nor does it need any installation or house maintenance, so it does not face any kind of technological barrier by users. It works thanks to these pillars: the obtaining of data, which is securely and encrypted, by telecommunications and supply operators (TV, telephone, light, water, etc.); the detection of triggers, since it uses the data collected with algorithms to detect abnormal situations that require attention; the generation of notifications, by means of artificial intelligence that decides the type of notification to be sent; and at the same time advises on the type of accompanying and support that needs to be put in place and, if this is a prolonged action, the system will create a roadmap to carry out.

Invisicare

Cycling Without Age, voluntary rickshaws service for older people

Publications Bank of innovations

Cycling Without Age, voluntary rickshaws service for older people

Cycling Without Age

Ole Kassow, founder of Cycling Without Age, driving two users. Retrieved from the Cycling Without Age website

Voluntary service to promote active ageing and good treatment of older people, from the creation of new intergenerational relationships to combat unintended isolation and loneliness.

Cycling Without Age allows the elderly to feel emotion again and the freedom of a bicycle ride in which they can feel “the wind in their hair”. The service is made possible by voluntary people of all ages, who offer themselves to ride elderly people in two-seat rickshaws to recover a type of mobility that many of these people can no longer experience because of their old age.

It is a service that provides an improvement in the quality of life of both voluntaries and users. For the former it can be a way to exercise, connect with the community and other people and create unexpected relationships; and for the elderly it means to feel freer and avoid unwanted loneliness and isolation: during the rides they can tell personal stories while visiting the city or territory where they have lived all or part of their lives and rememorize episodes they can share with the volunteer and other participants.

There is no fixed timetable for rides or volunteers, but everyone decides how much time they can and want to contribute, making Cycling Without Age an activity that is done for the pleasure of doing it, not out of obligation.

It is an activity that began in Denmark, where bicycles are widely used, but has spread rapidly to 51 countries around the world, among which Catalonia, where it’s called “En bici sense edat”, making this experience available for more people. The Catalan initiative “En bici sense edad” is already present today in four Catalan cities and in April 2021 it received the prize of Social Innovation Maria Figueras i Mercè Bañeras from Plataforma Educativa.

Cycling Without Age

3D Community, social housing built with 3D printers

Publications Bank of innovations

3D Community, social housing built with 3D printers

New Story, ICON, Échale

Two kids in front of one of the houses built in Mexico. Retrieved from New Story’s website.

3D-built housing, which enables high-quality housing parks to be generated and in a much faster and more affordable way than with traditional construction options.

The first housing park with this technology has been built in Tabasco, Mexico, and consists of 50 houses. The houses are made with the collaboration of ICON, a construction technology company. Thanks to its 3D Vulcan printer, which uses a cement mix called Lavacrete, it can build secure and durable constructions with very little time, as 3D printers can work uninterruptedly for 24 hours, until completion of construction. End touches, such as roofs or windows, are added in the traditional way, employing local builders.

Families living in these early Mexican dwellings previously participated in the process of designing their home, bringing their vision of their own needs and what they thought important to have at home. These families were selected through interviews and surveys in the area, to identify those with the greatest need. The houses have a social mortgage of about 400 pesos per month, a mortgage that does not return to New Story, the sponsoring organization, but rather to a Community fund from which families will be able to dispose in the future to invest in this community. In this way, it not only innovates in the way it is built, but also creates a community of owners that empowers the people who are part of it.

New Story

Ipso, international service of psychosocial peer-to-peer support

Publications Bank of innovations

Ipso, international service of psychosocial peer-to-peer support

International Psychosocial Organization (Ipso)

Peer-to-peer counselling session. Retrieved from Ipso’s website.

International mental health service and psychosocial support for peer-to-peer which offers offline and online in more than 20 languages (such as Arabic, Farsi, Punjabi, among others), and which today has more than 200,000 beneficiaries, mostly people who are immigrants, refugees or victims of armed conflicts.

Ipso counsellors are other persons of the same origin who are previously formed in Value Based Counselling, a type of short-term intervention that seeks to establish empathy with the person concerned and to support them without prejudice. In addition, the sociocultural plurality that allows this methodology makes it easier to adapt it to different contexts and to give service to a very high and diverse number of users.

It is a peer-to-peer service, which serves to empower both parties, and which at the same time seeks to prevent the hardships or traumatic situations that have been experienced from becoming chronic or leading to more serious problems, while helping in social integration.

Ipso services have spread widely in some countries such as Afghanistan, where it is present throughout the country through the public health service. The training of the counsellors is done mainly in Germany, in the headquarters of Ipso in Berlin, Erfurt and Hamburg, where they prepare people who are immigrated to do so. In other countries, such as Jordan, Iraq, Haiti and others, the Ipso service has also been extended through collaborating organisations.

Psychosocial support sessions can be performed face-to-face but also online through a secure video platform called ipso-care.com, and this has allowed the territorial scope of Ipso to become much broader, and at the same time indispensable during the Covid-19 pandemic.

It is available in more than twenty languages, such as Arabic, Farsi, English, French, Russian, Turkish, Punjabi and others, because it is considered vitally important that people who receive this service can express themselves in their mother tongue.

International Psychosocial Organization (Ipso)