Latest Shapes News
diAnia is a free smartphone application created by SciFY (www.scify.org) in collaboration with dementia professionals from Alzheimer Athens. It is aimed at the caregivers of people with mild cognitive impairment and at the early stages of dementia. diAnoia offers practical ways to help people with dementia improve their cognitive functions, their mood, functionality and quality of life. It offers cognitive exercises, ideas for spending quality time together, daily reminders, and allows monitoring the frequency of mental stimulation. Families, caregivers and health professionals have in hand an everyday helper that:
- offers printable cognitive exercises to work on memory, attention skills, in a familiar way for the elderly (paper and pencil).
- makes exercises more attractive using storytelling: mental stimulation exercises are incorporated into stories that make exercises fun
- sends notifications on the smartphone with every day suggestions to spend quality time together;
- sends reminders about what is important: key points that should not be forget;
- allows to keep track of the exercises performed (user history).
diAnia is freely available for Android and iOS in Greek. The beneficiaries are estimated to be around 5,500.
SciFY will enrich diAnia to be able to deploy it in three (3) languages. SciFY will also create a marketplace that will allow experts in dementia to create additional content in various languages, and make available this content in the diAnoia Marketplace. This approach will allow that diAnoia’s content will continue to grow.
The 2nd Shapes Dialogue Workshop
On October 29, 2020, one of Prof. Molloys project partners, Carus Consilium Sachsen GmbH, hosted the 2nd SHAPES Dialogue Workshop, which focused on integrated care and user perspectives.
With a total of 124 registered participants and an average of 60 participants connected during the day, the virtual workshop was a dynamic and well-attended event that brought together the SHAPES consortium and stakeholders from across Europe.
The workshop, which was fully accessible, began with YouTube sessions covering the key challenges in the area of integrated care. Participants were able to exchange during the sessions via a live chat. These covered SHAPES work in the field of integrated care, including reflections on the challenges for implementation and how SHAPES will contribute to tackling them.
The workshop included four parallel interactive workshops, organised four times simultaneously to allow participants to join all of them. These sessions in the small format allowed participants to contribute to discussions with their own experiences and knowledge. The variety of participants and a good mix of both SHAPES partners and external stakeholders allowed for fruitful exchanges of views.
These parallel discussions addressed four topics:
1) Good Practice Examples of Integrated Care, Lessons Learned and Future Concepts;
2) User Perspectives on Integrated Care;
3) Scaling up solutions for integrated care;
4) Disrupting Disintegration – Constructing a new mindset for caring.
The outcomes of these discussions are available in our Workshop Summary.
The Dialogue Workshop was a great opportunity for SHAPES to explore new ideas and practices, facilitate exchanges and discuss our work within the consortium and with externals. Organised following a 4-week SHAPES awareness campaign in social media under the hashtags #SHAPESDialogue and #IntegratedCare, the workshop contributed critically to SHAPES efforts to gain visibility in the landscape of European health and care initiatives.
This was the 2nd of a total of 8 Dialogue Workshops that Shapes will be organising during the project lifespan. The next is set to take place in April 2021, hosted by the University of Castilla-La Mancha (Spain), on the SHAPES Technological Platform.
More Shapes News
Another project partner, SciFY, has been working on SHAPES Pilot 2 – “Healthcare System for Cognitive and Physical training”. In this pilot, they will work on improving in-home and community-based care, providing an appropriate home setting for those needing care through a specialised nursing service.
SciFY is working closely with the Pilot Leader AUTH from Greece and other SHAPES partners involved in this task, to prepare crucial elements before the kick-off, namely:
– Describing in detail “who we are working for” so that we do not lose focus. Therefore, we are creating “personas” describing SHAPES end-users;– Setting a common language for partners and participants, so that we are all “on the same page” and understand each other. Therefore, we are describing the “scenario definitions”;
– Deciding the expected benefits for the end-users and how we will measure success. Therefore we are describing the Key Performance indicators (KPIs);
– Describing how digital solutions will work and perform. Therefore we are detailing functional and technical specifications.
Pilot leaders are providing useful feedback to enhance the user experience and presenting solutions that address users’ problems in a more comprehensive manner and that will allow us to achieve the best outcome from SHAPES users.