The “Llars Connectades” (Connected Homes) project aims to offer technological solutions such as sensors, voice assistants or smart watches to improve the safety and quality of life of the elderly or dependent people they receive.
As a result of this initiative, financed with a Next Generation Fund from the Department of Social Rights of the Generalitat de Catalunya, the cooperative is launching this February a pilot test to install this technology in a hundred homes all over Catalonia.
One of Suara Cooperativa's main challenges is to find innovative answers that improve people's quality of life and, for this reason, it cooperates with different technological companies with which they share both goals and values. In the case of this project, it has teamed up with YASYT Robotics, which has been responsible for creating the Llars Connectades Platform, assumes the technical part and carries out the training.
This February it is expected that this technology will begin to be implemented in homes, so the family workers of the first service where the pilot test will be carried out have recently been trained.
In the framework of these trainings, they learned how to use these devices, their functionalities, which ones should be implemented in each home according to the needs of each person; as well as the information extracted from these devices.
What is this technology used for?
In detail, devices such as voice assistants allow the person to receive reminders of the medication they take or when they have a medical visit while offering them a wide range of information and entertainment.
For their part, Smartwatches, which also allow reminders, can geolocate the person to receive warnings if they move away from the established area or make emergency calls.
In the case of sensors, there are two types. Those of presence are divided with those of movement or refrigerator. The former record the movements of people if they pass by; and the seconds, which are known as refrigerator ones, report how long a person has been without opening this appliance. With the data that is collected through this sensor model, patterns of behavior can be created. If these change, it may indicate, among other things, that the person has fallen or that they are changing their habits due to some new health problem.
As for the magnetic sensors, they serve to alert when a domestic accident occurs in a home: the air ones, which capture the temperature, the C02 concentration or the humidity: the water ones are activated in the event of a leak; or those of smoke, when there is a fire.
On the Llars Connectades platform, alarms are visualized and managed, and the reference person is located in the event that they are activated. As the project progresses through artificial intelligence algorithms, it will be possible to create patterns of behavior and analyze the data collected.
For now, this initiative will be completely free both for the people we accompany in the different services and for the councils that take part in this pilot test.
