Orkesta ends with a roadmap for the future of care for the elderly at home

The Hazitek Strategic Orkesta project: Comprehensive Solution for the Orchestration of Social and Health Services and Care at Home has officially ended. The project designs the future of long-term care, highlighting the role of technologies to connect and orchestrate services in a personalized way.

Indeed: the future of the Silver Economy sector depends on the elderly person being able to remain in their own home, without needing to live in a residence. To make this possible and in contrast to the current reactive model, Orkesta proposes a proactive system, which anticipates the appearance of possible problems.

This involves the use of different integrated devices, which allow people in the family and professional environment to monitor the health status of the elderly person and attend to their health and psychosocial needs, avoiding decompensation and serious deterioration and, therefore, contributing to their quality of life.

The closing meeting, held on May 31, brought together the consortium made up of 7 partners and 3 subcontracted entities at the ALCAD Electronics facilities in Irún. The session served to review the main actions, highlighting and thanking the participation of 57 elderly residents of the Caser Residencial Betharram apartments (Hondarribia).

Likewise, the availability of each of the participating entities to articulate innovative services was highlighted. They reviewed the main results of the project and the ambition of each of them in terms of quantification of impacts and future perspective.

This final meeting concludes a project subsidized by the Hazitek program to support Business R&D, promoted by Grupo SPRI together with the Department of Economic Development, Sustainability and Environment of the Basque Government, which has included 2 pilot stages in supervised apartments of Betharram Residential Caser.

In scientific-technological terms, Orkesta has given rise to 15 scientific publications, a notarial registration of a software library in the Intellectual Property Registry of the Basque Government and, above all, the strategic positioning of entities in the sector, with an important participation in European projects, tenders from public institutions, participation in innovative public procurement processes, etc.

New functionalities thanks to Artificial Intelligence

The scientific-technological development has been led by Vicomtech. Specifically, we have researched and developed functionalities related to home sensors, security and closure, clothing traceability, images to characterize positioning, voice recordings, etc., which have served to improve integrated asset management, providing added value to information. In this sense, we have designed multiple AI tools for natural language processing, anomaly detection, identification of trends and changes in habits, or decision support systems, among others.

In the case of ALCAD, the innovative and strategic nature of the project has allowed it to work on emerging technologies to make the nursing patient communication system devices more intelligent, developing sensorization and communication systems that help make the daily lives of older people be easier and safer.

The project has been led by ALCAD Electronics and has been made up of eleven of the most important companies and institutions in the Basque technological, social and socio-health fields: ALCAD Electronics, Caser Residencial, Eurohelp Consulting, Teknei, TESA-ASSA ABLOY, Asunción Klinika, Gureak, INGETEK, Vicomtech, UPV/EHU and APTES.