With a ten-month work track, the SHAPES project presents an ambitious pilot programme, involving fifteen organisations in ten European countries and more than two thousand older individuals that look for digital solutions with the capability to effectively improve their autonomy and independency.
EDGE and the SHAPES partners have defined a plan for preparing, executing and evaluating the different pilots, which embrace areas as diverse as building adequate home environments to foster healthy and active ageing, the improvement of care delivery at home and in the community, the control and optimisation of medication, the role of psychosocial and cognitive stimuli in the wellbeing of older individuals, the needs of older individuals with neurodegenerative diseases, the physical rehabilitation of older individuals at home and the importance of exchanging health data to support increased mobility and accessibility for older individuals. Throughout five distinct phases, the SHAPES pilots will be implemented by a leading organisation and replicated by other organisations, in order to ensure not only the observation of the different legal and ethical frameworks associated to the delivery of health and social care, but also a wider comparability of pilot results so as to develop a solution truly pan-European.
EDGE has been contributing to the refinement of the use cases that, considering the SHAPES personas and general use cases, will guide the pilot activities to be developed. With an approach based on co-creation, involving from the start the SHAPES technological partners and the diverse final users of the solutions, such as the older individuals, the informal caregivers and the health and social care professionals, the SHAPES project has been identifying the scenarios for the pilots, the participants’ profiles and the objectives to attain, as well as the digital solutions that may contribute to the proposed objectives. In this phase, it has been quite relevant the coordination of the technical teams, both the one responsible for the implementation of SHAPES digital solutions and the one responsible for the implementation of the pilot activities, in the design of the digital solutions and the construction of prototypes. In this context, EDGE takes responsibility for the technical lead in two use cases associated with two different pilot themes that involve partners from Germany, Spain, Italy, Czech Republic, Greece, Sweden and the United Kingdom.
In accordance to the SHAPES Pilot Campaign Plan, in the next year, it will be implemented a validation phase of the SHAPES Platform and digital solutions in small exercises, followed by the execution of the pilots, first in a controlled environment and then in real life environments. With an overall duration of twenty-four months, the SHAPES pilots will present results that comprehensively analyse the European landscape of integrated care for older individuals and the available set of digital solutions that may significantly improve the older individuals’ autonomy and independency.