“Community Lab” model to include non-profits in development and testing of new caregiving technologies
Why It Matters
Canada has one of the fastest-growing populations of seniors. Community organizations that work with older adults are urging technology developers to include them in the initial phases of designing technology that serves this demographic.
Non-profits and community organizations that work with older people will be key to testing new technologies that might be applied in caregiving contexts.
Through a new fund dedicated to AgeTech – an acronym for technologies to help the elderly – non-profits will collaborate with technology providers and academic institutions, directly bringing new caregiving and medical technologies into community settings.
Traditionally, these technologies are tested in clinical or academic settings, said Christina Stergiou-Dayment, chief programs and clinical operations officer at the Alzheimer Society of Ontario – one of the non-profits involved in envisAGE’s first funding round.
Testing through a “community lab” model allows caregiving institutions and developers to better understand how the technology works when other variables are considered, such as access to technology, digital literacy, location, and diversity, she said.
The envisAGE initiative – a collaboration between medical innovation and aging research organizations, MEDTEQ+ and AGE-WELL – is partly funded by the Government of Canada’s Strategic Innovation Fund.
At the initiative’s annual forum in Edmonton in October, the first round of projects that would receive funding and support was announced. A second call for innovations has already been announced.
Non-profits closest to beneficiaries of the technology
Community organizations are an important part of understanding aging care in Canada, said Sabrina Boutin, executive director of envisAGE and a vice president at MEDTEQ+.
She said they are not only closest to older adults but regularly carry out their own needs assessments to understand what types of technology would benefit the people they serve.
envisAGE pairs these non-profits with technology providers working in the AgeTech space. The two organizations—sometimes supported by an academic research institution—then submit a project proposal together.
For example, in Alberta The Brenda Strafford Foundation is partnering with Carecorp, a service provider to the elderly community, and Alberta Health Sciences, an umbrella authority that encompasses all healthcare services across the province.
Together, they are working on a speech recognition technology called NurseGPT, which can “support nurses’ workload and increase interaction with residents.”
“I think everyone agrees that these different innovators and start-ups are doing great work – we need more innovation,” said Jenna Naylor, research and innovative practice manager at The Brenda Strafford Foundation.
“And for the most part, a lot of these innovations are solving a problem.
“But the biggest challenge is that it’s not always solving a priority problem. With the limited resources, time and capacity that our staff and our sites have, we can’t just accept everything.”
There is also a challenge with frontline staff not being able to integrate new technology into their current workflows, which suggests that technology developers haven’t done their due diligence when understanding who their real users are, Naylor said.
The for-profit technology sector might get the impression that the non-profit sector is slow to improve or innovate, Naylor continued. However various barriers are out of organizations’ hands, from funding to regulations.
“I understand they need to make money, but there needs to be some sort of financial model in place that is feasible for both sides,” Naylor said.
“It doesn’t matter how great your innovation is: if you’ve out-priced yourself, it just feasibly cannot be adopted [by the non-profit sector].”
The Brenda Strafford Foundation is producing a guide for innovators to improve collaborative efforts between technology developers and those closest to their intended users.
Crucially, Naylor said, technology developers need to come to non-profits and community organizations when they initially have an idea or a concept rather than when they have already invested a lot of time and resources in a product.
“There’s often less flexibility to make those adaptations,” she said.
While most Canadians receive care from primary physicians, non-profits and the community sector continue to play a role in healthcare and need to advocate for resources, said Stergiou-Dayment. “We’re always trying to do more with less.”
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