Smarter meetings
The Royal Institute of Technology, KTH, is one of the winners in the Swedish Post and Telecom Agency´s innovations competition ”Reachable for all”. The purpose of the competition is to increase the accessibility to companies and the public sector for persons with disabilities. Funka will be contributing in the coming project, which is called ”Smarter meetings”.
There is great potential in using modern technology to achieve clear improvements both for individuals and for different agencies says Stefan Johansson, Funka’s ideologist and industrial PhD student. Cancelled and poorly executed meetings lead to unnecessary distress and to inefficient procedures. A simple thing as to remind people of meetings via text messages can make a big difference.
Funka, the Swedish National Association for Social and Mental Health, RSMH, and the social services in the City of Stockholm, Sweden, will be working with KTH, the Technical university in Stockholm, in the project ”smarter meetings”. In the project we’ll test methods for more efficient communication between public services and persons with mental and cognitive disabilities. Today’s work procedures have in a previous study been proven to contain substantial failings, which leads to unnecessary suffering and unnecessary waste of public resources.
The project will test modern ways of communicating in order to be able to describe room for improvement. The result will be a model, or ”prototype”, for how the traditional process with summons and record-keeping can be combined by the use of apps, scheduling software, mnemonic support and communication. The project will include both commercial apps for the mass market, and more adapted assistive technology products for cognitive support.
We’ll describe how the organisations’ traditional and work procedures would be able to relate and interact with the new tools. These operations exist in the social services in the City of Stockholm. In different ways it affects persons who are socially vulnerable, many of which have cognitive and mental disabilities. Contact and communication through smartphones and tablets are key elements of the study.
-Everyone involved in the project will help to find potential for improvement and we’ll use smart technology to see how it can help individuals and operations, Stefan Johansson continues.
Funded by: The Swedish Post and Telecom Agency´s innovations competition
Consortium: The Royal Institute of Technology (leader), Funka, the Swedish National Association for Social and Mental Health, RSMH, the social services in the City of Stockholm
Period: February 2015 – February 2016
Budget: 1,3 MSEK (130 000 Euros)
Funka’s work on accessibility for people with mental disorders