Periodic Reporting for period 3 - REACH2020 (Responsive Engagement of the Elderly promoting Activity and Customized Healthcare)
Reporting period: 2019-02-01 to 2020-01-31
The REACH system turns clinical and care environments such as homes and everyday life, day care centers and other geriatric facilities into highly personalized and data-driven early intervention systems that engage older persons in preventative and rehabilitative activity (primarily physical activity but also with regard to cognitive, mobility, social and nutritional aspects). REACH achieves its objectives through an integrated sensing-monitoring-intervention chain that is exemplarily and iteratively adapted in the project to the ecosystems of a series of care settings for older persons.
A unique feature of REACH is the integrated utilization of personalized behavior change engagement, and user (and caregiver) experience techniques informing the development of the toolkit elements (sensors, interfaces, devices, etc.). REACH implements a combination of wearable and ambient sensors for each Touchpoint along with a set of co-adapted Machine Learning elements. Personalized Intelligent Interior Units (PI²Us) are used to seamlessly integrate the above described functional elements into daily life in the different target use case settings.
REACH created new market opportunities for European industry including SMEs to capitalize on European high-tech-knowhow, in order to make Europe a market leader in prevention technologies and at the same time tackle the ultimate cause of rising healthcare expenditures. REACH expressively engineers acceptability features (privacy, ethics, legal, accessibility dimensions) into its solutions that ensure viability (e.g. in the context of the GDPR), trust by end-users and society and a branding as being a European way.
REACH developed products and services that are allocated at the intersection between medical and non-medical products. REACH therefore made initial steps towards clinical evaluation and developed a medical certification roadmap for its solutions. These activities were supported by REACH’s active involvement and lead in numerous standardization frameworks on national, European (CEN), and worldwide (ISO) levels.
REACH achieves its objectives through highly integrated and personalized sensing-monitoring-intervention chains representing comprehensive solutions that are exem-plarily and iteratively adapted in the project to the ecosystems of a series of care set-tings throughout Europe (homes, hospitals, care homes, day care facilities, communi-ties, etc.) for older individuals. REACH implements, demonstrates, tests, and vali-dates (by more than 30 small- to medium-sized trials) through those settings, customized and personalized instances of this chain. A unique feature of REACH is the inte-grated utilization of digitally enabled and personalized behavior change and user en-gagement techniques informing about the development of the products and solutions (sensors, interfaces, devices, etc.).
REACH implements a combination of wearable and ambient sensors for each Touch-point along with a set of co-adapted Machine Learning elements. Machine Learning is used as a core element in multiple ways, for instance, to predict Activities of Daily Liv-ing (ADLs), recognize physical activity and behavior trends, detect deviations of pat-terns and critical situations, cluster and profile individuals, and inform the effective-ness of the assignment of certain interventions. Personalized Intelligent Interior Units (PI²Us, i.e. smart furniture devices) are used to seamlessly integrate the aforemen-tioned functional elements into daily life in the different target use case settings. Last but not least, REACH has developed practices and schematics to assess the implica-tions of the use of its solutions with regard to privacy, legal, and ethical aspects in or-der to ensure technology acceptance by end-users, caregivers, and other care and medical professionals.
In Reporting Period 3, we have worked systematically towards commercialization aspects in order to foster the developed solutions to go successfully through the so called “valley of death” in terms of innovation. REACH sharpened the medical pur-pose of its solutions, developed a regime for motivational market segmentation, and worked with a series of practice cases and demonstrations toward clarifying value chains and business procedures.
1) Detailing of a unique REACH Sensing-Monitoring-Intervention activity flow and the creation of tailormade instantiations for a series of practice cases (homes, hospitals, communities, etc.) from REACH toolkit elements.
2) Demonstration of the effectiveness of life integrated and target orientated gamified training with technologically enhanced artefacts that also serve as geriatric performance assessment tools.
3) Development of a REACH specific design process for personalized behavior change settings and application of this process to the design of a variety of REACH system elements.
4) Development and detailing of novel sensing Body Area Networks (wearable and ambient sensors) together with a Human Activity Recognition chain for early intervention and rehabilitation guidance.
5) Testing and fine tuning of a set of supervised and un-supervised Machine Learning methods including a behavior recommender system.
6) Prototyping the Personalized Intelligent Interior Units (PI²Us), a set of smart modular furniture elements that serve as physical carrier elements of REACH functional-ity.
7) Creation of business opportunities for novel products through the bottom up development of novel business strategies (e.g. through motivational market segmentation).
With the current breakthroughs, REACH shows that, as originally foreseen, it will have an impact with respect to:
a) Technological innovation (e.g. through novel sensing and data analytics ap-proaches)
b) Benefits for older persons (e.g. earlier and more personalized and fun engagement in physical activity)
c) Care system (e.g. the REACH system will enhance the productivity and effectiveness of monitoring and the provision of interventions through empowering older persons and make physical activation safer)
d) Industrial growth and competitiveness (e.g. each Touchpoint adds value to a central product, e.g. a walker or bed, by turning it into a complex Product-Service-System with much higher value creation potential)