Blackwood Homes provide a range of accessible housing. They partnered in a consortia with The Data Lab to build homes and communities, enabling vulnerable and frail individuals to live more independently using cutting-edge assisted technologies.
The Challenge: A vision for innovative assisted technologies
Blackwood Homes have the vision to build homes that enable people with illnesses like Alzheimer’s to live more independent lives using new innovative assisted technologies. They aimed to co-create attractive homes and neighbourhoods for independent living, promoting healthy and happy lifestyles. They wanted to co-design and test new ideas with real people and learn together what it takes to develop thriving neighbourhoods of the future with assisted technology.
The Solution: Funding success and data-driven collaboration
In partnership with The Data Lab, Canon Medical, the University of Edinburgh, our sister Innovation Centre CENSIS and car rental giant Enterprise, they attended meetings and workshops seeking funding to build on the success of the SMILE project (part-funded by The Data Lab), which demonstrated how smart meter data can be used to infer many health and wellbeing measures. This project de- risked further investment into solutions designed to facilitate the switchover from analogue to digital care systems.
The Outcomes: Quality of life and social care transformation
The Data Lab assisted Blackwood Homes and the consortia to secure funding from UKRI’s Healthy Ageing Trailblazers challenge – the only funded project in Scotland – to create neighbourhoods for independent living. This ongoing project is being trialled in three Scottish neighbourhoods, and all signs point to the ability to provide an additional five healthy years, in line with the mission of the funding. New products and services have been launched, which build on work done with SMILE to now form, a bespoke digital care and support system aiming to improve quality of life, tackle digital exclusion, and transform social care practice.
The engagement levels across the regions within this project have been strong and we are working with partners to establish how this can be rolled out nationally and across private care and social care services.
“Working in partnership is key to delivering an exemplar project, and we believe it has been vital in our work to create a future-proof model that will allow people to live healthier and happier for longer.”
Simon Fitzpatrick – Development and Commercial Director, Blackwood Housing and Care
on the Peoplehood Project