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A Social Network for Care and Mutual Support

In the past few years, there is a growing interest to create innovative ICT-based

products, services and systems to support elderly people for ageing well at home, in the

community, and at work, thus increasing the quality of life, autonomy, participation in

social life, skills and employability, and reducing the costs of health and social care .However, the existing AAL (Ambient Assisted Living) systems have questionable efficacy,

and it is unclear whether a multi-million dollar smart home is more efficient than a two

dollar cane, in terms of increasing the autonomy and self-confidence of the elderly.

In our vision, the AAL technology should not attempt to replace humans, but to enable

and foster complex interactions between them, in order to attract more caregivers in

human centered AAL systems.

We propose a social network for care, based on a prosumerist approach on caregiving,

wherein producers and consummers of care may switch roles.

The main idea is that the need for care for a certain person can be predicted years before

it actually occurs. Most people suffering from chronic evolutive diseases are capable not

just to take care of themselves, but also to help other people with similar problems, for a

long time before they actually reach a state when they need constant care from others.

We can imagine a system similar to the pension system, wherein each participant invests

some time and effort as caregiver, and expects to receive similar treatment when he will

need it.

Considering the pretty obvious fact that mentorship is just a special type of caregiving ,

we summarize here the principles for creating a web based platform for mutual care

and mentoring: Create an Internet based platform, to manage and display the requests for

assistance from various sources (SMS, MMS, email, web).

Create a database of caregivers, and keep track of their activity, by allowingthem, after a registration, to select from the current list of active requests for

assistance. Let them work Wiki-style, when they choose, what they choose, but

keep a record of the total time they spend in caregiving activities.

Allow direct communication between careseekers (or their families) andcaregivers (Skype, mobile, email, IP cameras when possible). Enable telepresence

when possible.

Create a system for reputation management based on user feedback (ebay style)for both careseekers and caregivers, so that any user can access a profile ofthe persons with whom he comes in contact, and provide feedback after the

actual contact.

Implement some recommender system functions, in order to automaticallymatch careseekers and caregivers, based on their profiles, and previous activity

records.

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Note that, once created, the system described above will require minimal costs for

maintenance. After some time, the right to register as a careseeker in the system can be

restricted only to former caregivers. Careseekers without a previous record as

caregivers may be required to pay a fee in order to benefit from the services offered by

the system.

In principle, such a system can be maintained by NGOs or Government authorities.Several similar systems can operate in parallel.

Most of software modules involved are open source.