INSIGHTS / Blog

Anita Allott, Co-Founder and CMO and Founder of nquiringMinds (www.careteam.nquiringminds.com) and SETsquared Southampton member, explains how Artificial Intelligence (AI) is being used to revolutionise care for an ageing population.

The compound impacts of an ageing population and diminishing resources for local authorities mean our social care system is in crises. Local authorities are faced with the impossible problem of doing more with less. The economic realities of current services provision mean it is it getting harder and harder for citizens to qualify for state assisted support, and the care agencies are becoming insolvent or refusing to bid on contracts because they are not financially viable

Many professional carers carry out their duties with a permanently connected, advanced smartphone in their pocket, but it is not unusual for their daily schedule to have been “faxed” to them the day before and printed out on a piece of paper they must fill in then transcribe. There is clearly something wrong with this picture.

NquiringMinds is applying our expertise in the fields of Artificial Intelligence and Cybersecurity to the Healthy Ageing Challenge. Our vision is to develop a truly innovate care platform – CareTeam – an application that uses AI to analyse sensor data and securely shares that data with friends, family and neighbours.

The CareTeam platform is based on three central pillars:

1. Collaboration: Care is a naturally collaborative activity, typically involving friends, family, health professionals and care agencies. But all too frequently the necessary and natural collaboration is hampered by logistics, bureaucracy and lack of availability of appropriate technology to facilitate the sharing of data and analysis. Powering this collaboration is essential, not only for efficiency reasons, but strategic reasons: the only practical way we can address the fundamental challenge of doing “more with less” is to fully embrace the community into the state provision of care.

2. Citizen Centric Security: It is pure common sense the elderly citizen should be placed the centre of their care. But all too often their reality is “organisation centric”. Not only is this intuitively wrong, but the uncertainty over which organisation has the right to share data with another, creates friction for the data sharing that is essential for collaborative care. GDPR, has inadvertently magnified this problem. Organisations are even more paranoid over what data they can legitimately share. We believe that citizen centric care, where the citizen is fully informed and fully empowered to control access to data – fundamentally solves the problem of inter organisation data sharing. And this is why it is such a central tenant of the CareTeam platform.

3. AI powered intelligence:. We are seasoned veterans in applying AI techniques to AI problems. This doesn’t mean robots or voice-controlled care assistants, but it does mean well-grounded, market proven AI techniques being applied to under-utilised data.

Applying AI to the problem

We are using data and advanced analytics to transform lives.  By applying advanced analytics to many problems facing a smart city, such as an ageing population, we are addressing one of the major challenges facing Britain in the 21^st Century.

With CareTeam the end user owns and controls the data.  CareTeam borrows from the best of social networking, and applies this to real problems facing caring for an adult at home.

By using low cost sensors in the home, we create a behavioural fingerprint.  We see this as the modern day equivalent of ‘milk bottles on the doorstep’ so by using AI and data we are helping adults stay in their homes for longer.

We are offering a limited number of customers a free 12 month trial of the CareTeam solution. If you are interested, please email [email protected]  or register your interest on our website www.careteam.nquiringminds.com

We are also interested in talking to Local Authorities and Health Organisation that are keen to take the next step in their social care strategy.