Project: Care for balancing informal care delivery through on-demand multi-stakeholder service design

Acronym	Care4Balance (Reference Number: aal-2012-5-071)
Duration	01/03/2013 - 01/09/2015
Project Topic	Through innovative and reciprocal service design, C4B aims at on-demand care management and balancing care tasks in order to support older adults with care dependencies that are living at home and their informal carers network. It creates a balanced ecosystem in which informal and formal care strengthen and complement each other, giving informal carers assistance through cooperation with formal carers, whilst optimizing the balance of “proximity” versus “autonomy” in view of the elderly person. It supports sustainable informal care and avoids overprotection, potentially leading to burn-outs and non-optimal situations. The older adult will have a status board based on visual tags, through which status updates and care needs can be indicated. Involved care actors will have a dashboard view on status and needs of the older adults based on contextual and interactive information and on the status and actions of the other carers. Early warning systems based on sensor technology and intelligent data analysis will extend direct user needs and will be implemented leading to more peace of mind and QoL. All these components are linked together through a generic platform that service providers and formal carers can use to deliver services or applications. All these technical innovations will create an ecosystem that brings together older adults, informal and formal carers and optimizes care. End user participation is crucial to achieve these goals. C4B foresees co-creation of the C4B service with the older adults and their carers. Through iterative development cycles and early introduction into living labs and field trials, our end users evaluate the solutions. C4B envisages market introduction through (home)care organisations offering a platform to balance formal and informal care provision. Informal carers will be able to give better and sustainable care, decreasing overall care cost and improving QoL. C4B improves personalized and on-demand care provision.
Website	visit project website
Network	AAL
Call	Call 5 – Daily Life Activities

Project partner

Number	Name	Role	Country
	Alcatel Lucent Bell N.V.		Belgium
	AMSTA		Netherlands
	ConnectedCare		Netherlands
	Hogeschool van Amsterdam		Netherlands
	iHomeLab - LUAS		Switzerland
	iMinds		Belgium
	Interdisciplinary Institute for BroadBand Technology		Belgium
	Pervaya		France
	Televic Healthcare		Belgium
	Van Dorp Zorg en Welzijn B.V.		Netherlands
	Vigisense SA		Switzerland