ElderlyCare@2020

The results from the pre-project was a foundation for further work, outlined in the main project, and the project in its entirety can be considered a follow-up of governmental objectives on increased effort in the home care and nursing sector. The main project intended to contribute to improving quality, accessibility and resource usage through developing and focusing on the possibilities attended with the use of telemedicine.

By establishing an arena across sectors in which we could work with the scenarios, we wanted to stimulate to evolve ideas, products and services which on the long view might affect the home care and nursing sector positively. Thus, the project aimed towards participants from political and administrative systems, health workers in the home care and nursing sector, users of such services, industry and research and development communities. The project intended to arrange 3 workshops during the project phase where all these participants were gathered to push the project forward.

In addition to developing scenarios, a virtual laboratory was to be established. In this laboratory future technological possibilities wwas to be explored, e.g. wearable computing, ubiquitous computing and multimodality.

The project was supposed to be finalised in connection with the Tromsø Telemedicine and eHealth Conference in June 2004, where the project participants was to be gathered a fourth time. On this workshop a comprehensive presentation of the end results should be given, and possible further cooperations or new projects in the home care and nursing sector was to be discussed.

"Scenario would be based on both elderly and/or the service segment.

By elderly we mean those older than 65 years. The Worlds Health Organization (WHO) defines elderly to be 65 to 79 years of age and the oldest elderly to be above 80 years of age. Those who are older than 90 years of age are called very old. In this project all these categories of age are considdered.

By service segment we mean employees and their work in institutions such as nursing homes, retirement homes, home care services and care homes.

Comments to the focus:
When it comes to sceanriobuilding focused on the abovementioned service activities, such activities also  include younger users than the focus states. Because of this various visions of the future will principally also imply younger users, with similar disabilities and needs as the elderly."