Dutch Pilot
The objectives of the Dutch pilot are to promote social cohesion and to reduce social isolation and loneliness by matching people and promoting healthy ageing through lifestyle coaching provided by technological solutions. Accordingly, the two main use cases being demonstrated are related to community building and providing tailored health advice to older adults.
The Dutch pilot focuses on the PlusBus of the National Foundation for the Elderly. Older people using the PlusBus want the service to be enriched with the possibility to stay connected online after an activity, and to remain physically fit to be able to continue to join activities of the PlusBus. The Dutch pilot’s aim is to support the users of the PlusBus in these goals of staying connected and staying fit by extending the services of the PlusBus.
The services of the PlusBus are being extended with a set of integrated technologies. These technologies are: Regicare message pages for activities of the PlusBus (AdSysCo); PACO an virtual eating and cooking coach (RRD); MISS Activity, a monitoring tool for physical activity (Maastricht Instruments). They can all be accessed from the RegiCare customer portal (AdSysCo). Moreover, the use of these technologies starts with the wizard (RRD), also on this portal. In the wizard, conversational agent Robin helps the user get started.
Pre-validation sessions were carried out to test the usability of the technologies with users of the PlusBus. By completing a set of tasks the users got to experience the full set of technologies. The users pointed out some points of improvement (e.g, enhance contrast to improve readability) which have been incorporated. Due to COVID 19-restrictions the sessions were held online. The next step is to assess the PlusBus users’ satisfaction with and the feasibility of the PlusBus-extension in an evaluation study. Eighty PlusBus-users will get to use the technologies for one year.