Our innovation addresses three main problems. First, our innovation is addressing the concept of “aging in place”, or older adults living independently in their own home. Our innovation is focusing on this problem so that older adults will be able to live independently in their homes for a longer period and maintain autonomy, while ensuring a safe environment. Second, this product addresses the issues that service providers face in delivering high quality services and care to older adults, such as staffing and identifying care recipients in need. Third, family members often provide informal care for older adults. However, due to the demands of providing care, family members may be prone to experience burnout and strain, which increase the likelihood of elder abuse occurring in the home. Our innovation aims to address this problem through providing support and services that will aid family members and older adults, thereby decreasing the chance of elder abuse.

These problems are currently being solved by the availability and use of at-home care services. At-home care companies address these problems through providing services that help keep the older adult at home and assist the family members with managing care. However, these services do not commonly take a person-centered approach when selecting caregivers and care recipients. Additionally, this problem is also indirectly being addressed by older adults moving out of their homes and transitioning into long-term care facilities. This option is expensive, and the quality of care varies. Older adults often have a decline in their sense of independence when transitioning into long-term care facilities. Some moves into long-term care are made prematurely for older adults with low-care needs, which our innovation could potentially prevent in the home setting.

To solve these issues, we have built a web-based application that is specifically designed to be usable by older adults due to its simple design. This prototype demonstrates our idea of connecting service providing agencies to the customers through our optimized and senior friendly application. The prototype will be much superior to any other existing solution because it can be used directly by the senior adults.