WHAT:

The “Joint Competence Center for smart elderly care social services development” project aims to develop and implement smart elderly care services by strengthening disease prevention measures and the creation of new openly available services for people with special needs. This “Joint Competence Center” brings together Latvian and Lithuanian social care, science and education community members to enable exchange of existing knowledge and improve the quality of life of elderly people.

The project is part of the Interreg V-A Latvia-Lithuania 2014-2020 Cross-border Programme and received a total of 499177,44 EUR from the European Regional Development Fund.

WHERE:

This 2-year project (2017-2019) took place across the Lithuanian-Latvian cross-border area.

HOW:

During this project new elderly care, electronic services have been introduced in social care homes in Lithuania and Latvia and accessibility of social services to the public has been improved. Social care and information and communication technology specialists from both countries created a real-time human physiological parameters monitoring service that allows professionals to identify and assess health problems, create individual physical activity programs in order to improve their quality of life, prolong their independence and increase their integration into society.

RESULTS:

The project partners and institutions have implemented all the project activities and achieved the project outputs and goals planned for the project.

A working meeting group took place on June 20th 2018 in Ventspils, Latvia, in which were discussed: possible ways to solve the issues challenging the project; the progress of the development and pilot implementation of the newly created social service and infrastructure; aside from the activities for the third period and the tasks that each partner needed to do during the first period of the project.

The members of the target groups of personnel from the Klaipeda University students and staff members, Ventspils social care home staff, Klaipeda City Care Home staff, and Ventspils Digital Center staff were able to attend three common training courses in Klaipeda and Ventspils as way to develop their practical skills and theoretical knowledge.

Partners working together have started preparing the common requirements for the new smart social e-services ICT system for elderly care in cooperating partners’ network and a business plan for the centre created in the cross-border region.

All the partners cooperating have prepared the common needs and feasibility study on social services and infrastructure as well as the common report on investigation of institutional partners’ capacities and cooperation possibilities, and the report on pilot implementation of new smart eldercare social services.

Partners have continued disseminating information to the public throughout press, web and Facebook communication means.

The agreement between project partners on establishment Joint Competence Center has been signed.

Although the project has finished, partners continue to provide smart elderly care social service (Real time physiological data acquisition from wrist system) in the Ventspils and Klaipeda social homes and they have smart sensors available for new costumers. Moreover, minibus for persons with functional impairments was purchased by Ventspils city Social service and it ensures transportation services for clients of the target group. Transportation services help elderly people to visit doctors, get to different state and municipal institutions in order to receive different services, to visit cultural events in order to encourage involvement of this socially unprotected people integration into social and public events, to ensure health care accordingly to their needs and reduce risk of social isolation.

More information is available at: http://jointsmartsocialservices.eu/en/?fbclid=IwAR2YInC5iqf2tnt9gG8u5OGmEFWX7oBJIKk6PmcoCYfVfWuLe8nU51DTx_I 

Alternatively, check their page on Facebook to see the development and other updates of the project.