Santander (EFE).- The Santander City Council participates in an innovative project to manage the frailty of older people with digital solutions and thus promote their independent life.
The Councilor for Innovation, Álvaro Lavín, highlighted in a press release the importance of this programme, which has been in progress since 2019 and which is now in its third and final phase.
Frailty is an age-related condition, affecting one in four adults over the age of 85 in Europe.
“Longevity is one of the greatest achievements of modern societies, but the quality of life of older adults in their later years can be worse due to frailty and long-term illnesses,” Lavín points out.
In Santander, people over the age of 70 represent 20% of the total population, so the City Council wants to promote their care and promote their participation in the social life of the city.
Thus, the objective of the project in which the city participates is to seek digital solutions for the prevention and comprehensive management of frailty in the elderly.
They also want to alleviate the “budgetary pressure” of health and care services.
During the last phase of the project, which lasts one year, the developed prototypes will undergo a rigorous evaluation in real conditions, so that performance, interoperability, scalability and other aspects will be verified and compared in the operational context of the public service to which it is directed.
Innovation in frailty management
The eCare project, framed in the public innovation tool called Innovative Public Procurement in its Pre-Commercial Procurement modality (PCP) and promoted by the European Union, follows a rigorous evaluation process to identify and support the most effective approaches.
In December 2021, eight innovation proposals were chosen to compete in the public ideas competition, from a pool of 19 offers received from consortia of international companies during an open call.
In July 2022, four of the eight selected vendors moved to the second phase and, for the last ten months, have dedicated their efforts to develop prototypes for the technical, social, medical, financial and commercial viability of their solution, meeting the contracting requirements.
The two solutions now chosen to enter the third phase and develop a field pilot are, on the one hand, a comprehensive solution to detect frailty and pre-frailty and their follow-up, with a digitized care model for the elderly and a virtual assistant to offer effective preventive, therapeutic and educational interventions.
And on the other, a solution equipped with various tools to detect frailty and pre-frailty in older adults.