Periodic Reporting for period 1 - Aladin (Aladin: A Smart Home-Care Solution for the Elderly.)
Período documentado: 2018-05-01 hasta 2018-08-31
Ageing of the population is a critical socioeconomic challenge facing Europe today, with a pressing need to improve the life quality of elderly people while reducing the burden on informal caregivers and public health systems. The overall objective of Aladin is the prevention and real-time notification of falls and health deterioration through automatic lighting and unobtrusive behaviour monitoring.
With the Phase 1 SME Instrument, our technical feasibility study yielded positive results, confirming our freedom to operate internationally, as the fall detection system of 2 vertically aligned digital motion sensors is already patented by us. The full functionality of our innovative automatic fall detection system needs an analogue sensor and a new lens, which is being developed with a Partner company. We defined the specifications for a robust behavioural analysis module and tested this functionality in a small number of homes using off-the shelf software, after which we designed a new test to collect a larger dataset. Our market study showed great potential for growth in the home care segment, with the EU 50+ population projected to spend 1,052b € in healthcare by 2025. We identified the barriers that have prevented the adoption of competing solutions in this segment, and designed a commercial strategy to overcome them successfully. The strategy includes our technological excellence, unique bundling of features, a B2B2C model, and a staged internationalisation plan prioritising the US market. Finally, we defined a 2-year workplan and the necessary resources to reach full technology readiness, which we will seek to complete through a Phase 2 SME grant. Summing up, our study showed that the idea is technically, commercially, and financially feasible.
Our target progress beyond the state of the art is to collect enriched behaviour monitoring data from movement sensors and its integration in a wide ecosystem, all from a plug-and-play and decorative device featuring automatic lighting. This will introduce to the silver economy market a highly disruptive and comprehensive device that can significantly enable elderly people to live safely at home for longer, preserving their independence and health, and saving over 25b € annually in the treatment of fall-related injuries in the EU. In addition, this work would greatly impact Domalys to grow from 20 to 120 employees in 6 years, significantly strengthening our R&D department and transforming our ability to innovate.