Dr Daniel Gooch

Working with youth organisations, leading tech employers and national/regional skills agencies, DigitalSkills by the Open University (OU) will support 10,000+ Generation Z individuals who may not otherwise participate, to develop technical digital skills and the confidence to move into further study/work by March 2025.

The STRETCH team at the Open University, University of Exeter, and Nottingham Trent University are proposing to develop a novel multi-platform digital intervention addressing isolation and loneliness of older adults exacerbated by the COVID-19 crisis. This app facilitates a) expression and logging emotions to increase feelings of control, b) visualization and analysis of personal support networks to increase resilience, c) enabling individuals to communicate their emotions and feelings of loneliness with family and friends to provide a reliable source of emotional support, d) analysis of these data to offer personalized insights. We expect this app to have concrete benefits on feelings of loneliness, social efficacy and security which in turn will have measurable long-term health benefits.

The aim of this project will be to build a dynamic and resilient socio-technical system that sustains care for people with chronic illnesses in old age. Its principle novelty will be the integration of human and technical resources into a single system that will have resilient care at its heart. Resilience will mean both social resilience and technical resilience. To deliver social resilience we will explore how technology can help to harness existing social support as well as building wider social capital around older people. To deliver technical resilience we will design systems that integrate existing technological capacity in novel configurations as well as integrating new sensing / Internet of Things capability. However, the key innovation will be that the integrated socio-technical system will allow for the interchange between human assets and technological assets in the delivery of a resilient care architecture for older people. The system will not seek to replace human resource with a technology derived alternative, but to harness the capacities of all elements of the system in a way that serves the needs of the older person. Sometimes the system will respond to need through mobilising human resources, at other times the same need could be met through technological capability. In that sense, the system will have the needs of the older person at its core.

Older adults can face many health challenges as a result of being overweight, including diabetes, heart disease, some forms of cancer and stroke. One way to decrease these risks is by losing weight, which often means increasing the amount of physical activity someone is doing. Both social support and technology devices can support older adults in increasing the amount of exercise they undertake. This project aims to understand how community support can make fitness tracking technology more effective. We want to explore the use of community displays which receive individuals' health tracking data, combine the data for a community and presenting it, alongside targeted health information, back to the community through shared displays. Fundamental to this proposal is to work with communities to understand their needs and desires around supporting people's health through community technology. We want to run a series of workshops to better understand the questions communities think we should be asking, and then work with these communities to collaboratively design how the community displays could work. In doing so, this will have two key benefits. Firstly, the workshops will be designed to be a two-way conversation with older adults, and act as a two-way educational experience. This will empower the community and increase community awareness of health-related activities and behaviours. Secondly, these workshops would help us understand how to utilise citizen science co-design methods in this complex multi-disciplinary setting, allowing us to continue using these methods across other aspects of our research. ************************************************************** Final report due in 3 months after the submission date ie, 31.07.2020