Hacking technology for dementia

SIN Canada, in partnership with UK Trade and Investment (UKTI) and Ontario Shores Centre for Mental Health Sciences, will be running an exciting hackathon-type event on dementia in the summer/autumn of 2014.

The UK is strongly committed to improving care for people with dementia, launching the National Dementia Strategy in 2009 and the Prime Minister’s Challenge on Dementia in 2012, and hosting the G8 Dementia Summit in 2013. As part of the legacy of the UK’s G8 presidency, follow-up events on dementia will be held in the UK, Japan, Canada, Italy and the USA in 2014 and 2015.

This project is not one of the official G8 legacy events, but will contribute to broader work. The principal aim is to plan and develop a new technology platform for the self- and community management of dementia in a hackathon/sandbox-type environment. We suspect that the outputs will be a new suite of open software applications and some early-stage companies to commercialise them, but we may get a completely different and creative set of solutions (the value of an open and collaborative atmosphere!).

The event will bring together a diverse group of academic researchers (who need more data on how dementia affects people), clinicians (who currently manage dementia), people living with dementia (who can best articulate their needs), carers (who can best articulate their needs) and computer scientists (who have technical expertise). We hope to use a day to figure out what kinds of applications would best help people with their specific needs, and then another day or two to actually build some prototypes.

The core concept behind this project is that dementia is for the most part a manageable condition. A person living with dementia can use personalised assistive technology to maintain independence and quality of life, thus improving wellbeing and reducing strain on the healthcare system. While some assistive applications exist already, they do not contribute to research and are often designed for a specific task (e.g. contacts management) rather than a specific person’s individual needs.

This is a pretty unique and ambitious project, and we are really looking forward to working on it. We’ll be hiring a temporary staff member to do the actually planning and administrative work, so keep an eye on our jobs page on GOV.UK if you’re interested in working for us for a few months.