Carelink
Improving Resident Care in Aged Care Homes
A team of students from Aalto Design Factory and Design Factory Melbourne developed ‘Carelink’, a smart mattress to detect and prevent incidents in Aged Care Homes. Their solution uses Graphene – a smart material produced by Imagine Intelligent Materials that can detect pressure, movement, heat and moisture.
THE TEAM
THE PARTNER
Imagine Intelligent Materials develops sensing solutions that extract data for large areas such as building, infrastructure and logistics. The combination of their expertise in signals processing and their unique Graphene product’s ability to be incorporated into materials allows for the creation of products that essentially perform as ‘human skin,’ providing important data and feedback. Imagine was founded in 2014 with a headquarters in Geelong, Australia, as well as a digital processing engineering team in Salo, Finland. Imagine also works in partnership with Swinburne University of Technology for research and product development.
THE CHALLENGE
Envision the possibilities for a sensing surface – enabled by Imagine Intelligent Material’s Graphene product – that is cost-efficient, solves a real-life problem, and could potentially change lives.
THE SOLUTION
The quality of aged care facilities and services has been put under a microscope in recent years, from Australia to Finland and across the world. The team devised ‘Carelink’, a solution which aims to improve the quality of life for elderly people in aged care facilities and reduce the healthcare burden of ageing populations with a simple, easily-integrated mattress and software solution.
Carelink uses a mattress with a Graphene-based sensing material which can detect proximity, pressure, rapid movement (indicating seizures or pain), moisture (indicating incontinence) and heat. The mattress also includes a call button for residents to intuitively call for help.
Via a software application, aged care staff can receive notifications for any alerts detected through the mattress (i.e. a resident falling out of bed). The software app also includes each resident’s information, incident history and their current status. Aged care nurses can respond to alerts and input incident reports into the app.
A web application allows the facility’s management to download reports of data input, allowing incident trends to be discovered and therefore the development of tailored preventative solutions for the residents.
THE IMPACT
The Carelink solution can provide a better quality of care for aged care residents, with faster detection of incidents leading to faster response times. Carelink also aims to facilitate more positive interactions with aged care nurses as a result of a reduced workload due to a streamlined approach.