PROCare4Life Project Update!

It's been almost a year since PROCare4Life started, and what a year!
Throughout this first year, and despite all the challenges that the COVID-19 pandemic brought, the consortium was able to successfully achieve very interesting results.

We built the PROCare4Life website and created our social media accounts on twitter and facebook to ensure all our excellent project was being shown off to the world. We conducted research on users’ needs and requirements with interviews, workshops and online surveys carried out that allowed us to gather feedback from 217 people. This approach ensures a user-centred solution with the first functional PROCare4Life prototype being installed and tested soon in all scenarios namely at home, in rehabilitation and in daycare facilities. These will be rolled out in the project pilot sites of Spain led by Association Parkinson Madrid (APM), Italy guided by Casa di Cura del Policnico (CCPP), Germany directed by Wohlfahrtswerk für Baden-Württemberg (WBW), Portugal by Campus Neurológico Sénior (CNS) and Romania led by University of Medicine and Pharmacy "Carol Davila" Bucharest (UMFCD) and The University Emergency Hospital Bucharest (UHB)

With the implementation of this first prototype, currently being approved by the ethics committees of pilot sites, even more patients, caregivers and professionals are being recruited and involved to make sure their voices are heard and are at the heart of the design and implementation of the PROCare4Life project.

This is the first of our project newsletters and we are so proud and happy to bring you up to date with all that the project has achieved in its first twelve months. Make sure you sign up for the project newsletter to stay up to date with our excellent work.

The PROCare4Life communications team, led by IFIC, are getting creative and productive by developing a compelling series of animated videos to successfully help in the dissemination of the PROCare4Life project. The objective of the videos is to outline the PROCare4Life project in a comprehensible means and to engage with the project stakeholders and the wider audiences of the project. The team work closely with the other project partners to establish the aims of the animation series, taking into account all the feedback to form a creative brief and expectations of the videos.

Read more about how the animation will be developed and the story we wish to portray here!

The Association Parkinson Madrid and the PROCare4Life Consortium created 2 online surveys. These were aimed at gathering quantifiable data from Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s and dementia patients and their formal or informal caregivers, regarding the dynamic interplay between their daily life habits, needs and/or behaviours and issues that could influence their health, well-being and quality of life to inform ICT systems.

The anonymous surveys, collected information from existing end users’ from a variety of social and health European systems with different cultural backgrounds and are available in the following languages: English; German; Italian; Portuguese; Romanian and Spanish. To read more about the surveys and for more information click below.

A transversal qualitative research for rich data collection, through interviews and workshops, was first planned to be carried out through face-to-face interactions in this phase of the project, WP2- User, System and Ethical Considerations. But because of Covid-19 situation, the PROCare4Life Consortium tried to adapt to the current reality and researchers have re-designed their qualitative methods taking into account existing social-distancing measures.

The beginning of this research had to be postponed during the peak of the pandemic during months 3 to 5 of the project, to not put participants under any additional unnecessary stress. Also, after some internal discussions among partners, the Consortium decided to virtually replicate the interviews with the use of phone calls and video-calling software (e.g. Skype/Zoom).

By doing this, all partners had to inform their ethics committees about the modifications in the method of data collection with the health and wellbeing of our participants and researchers taking priority over research and project timelines.

In this sense and in this context, from June to August 2020, the PROCare4Life team and more specifically APM, CCPP, CNS, KIN, MU, UMF and WBW partners conducted 40 interviews

Director of Communications at the International Foundation for Integrated Care, Fiona Lyne asks can we go back to handshakes and hugs?

For many years we listened to anecdotes suggesting that rather than bringing us together, technology actually drives us apart. With children and indeed adults glued to handheld technology intimating that while we were in each other’s presence physically, we were really living separate lives. And while video conferencing technology has existed for some time, organizations have, by and large, chosen to have in-person, face-to-face meetings and events to make real connections, cementing this idea that technology acts as a barrier to relationship building and to make ‘business’ happen we need to look people in the eye and touch skin in a handshake or hug. The artificial barrier that the screen creates means that we lose our ability to feel a person’s presence and therefore read the minor movements of their body that gives us an insight to their demeanour and supports us to understand their emotional state or communication purpose.

At the same time we know too that technology has acted as a link for those who might otherwise have been disconnected. Families reaching out to loved ones far from home via skype or businesses with global offices connecting their staff to build teams across regions and continents.