Glasgow-based technology firm Archangel has recently secured a share of a £600,000 Smart & Connected Social Places (SCSP) 5G Innovation fund, with the support of the Digital Health & Care Innovation Centre, to deliver a groundbreaking integrated housing and care technology project in Biggar, South Lanarkshire.
The scheme, for a retirement housing development, involves a partnership with DHI (Digital Health & Care Innovation Centre) and Bield Housing & Care and is one of eleven digital health and technology projects across the Glasgow City region to have benefited from the latest round of 5GIR (Innovation Regions) funding from the UK Government’s Department of Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT).
Covering retired individuals within 25 homes, the ‘Evaluating care delivery in rural settings’ project will last six months and involves a range of unobtrusive sensors placed around the development and inside each individual’s home to monitor property and wellbeing conditions such as temperature, humidity and motion.
The data is then relayed immediately to Archangel’s ambient assisted living (AAL) technology platform and automatically monitored 24/7 to proactively address any potential issues that might arise in relation to the tenants or their living conditions.
The sensors are connected via Angelnet, the Archangel certified partner, resilient connectivity network, with the data then becoming available to all stakeholders via the Archangel platform.
Angelnet includes broadband, mobile and wireless LoRaWAN (Low power long range wide area network) connecting the IoT (Internet of Things) sensors within the properties and communal areas to provide a resilient, scalable and future-fit solution for housing and care by enabling wider connectivity.
Janette Hughes, Director of Planning & Performance at the Digital Health & Care Innovation Centre, who alerted Archangel to the funding opportunity, added: “This is ultimately about making housing safer and more responsive to personal circumstances for communities and allowing people to live happier, longer and more secure lives in their own properties. It is fantastic to see a Scottish business securing this type of funding as our role as a national Innovation Centre is to support research and innovation in digital health and social to help the people of Scotland live longer, healthier lives while supporting businesses access new funding and business opportunities.”
Tom Morton, Archangel’s CEO and Founder, explained: “Data related to social housing, health, care and wellbeing is currently fragmented across multiple vendor systems and siloed datasets. This disjointed approach creates inefficiencies and hinders the large-scale adoption of IoT due to the costs associated with numerous single-purpose systems and the specialised skills required to manage them. It also weakens efforts to support integrated healthy, sustainable home initiatives.
“This project showcases a smarter more cost-efficient approach to resolve these challenges using social housing data collection and presentation from multiple IoT (Internet of Things) devices via a unified communication infrastructure. It offers a single, holistic view of individuals and their home environments, allowing for collective decision-making and timely interventions,” added Tom.
Gavin Wright, Head of Property Management at Bield Housing, commented: “This project enables us to explore IoT expansion as part of our digital strategy and aligns closely with the Smart Social Housing initiative which aims to tackle a major challenge in housing, health and social care: the fragmentation of data across disconnected systems.”
Professor Soumen Sengupta, Director of Health and Social Care for South Lanarkshire, said: “A key objective of South Lanarkshire’s Local Housing Strategy is that people with particular needs are better supported to live independently within the community in a suitable, sustainable home. The integrated deployment of digital technologies will have an increasingly important role in this and I am looking forward to sharing the lessons learnt from this project across our local authority area, the wider Glasgow City Region and the country as a whole.”