Revolutionising healthy ageing

Mydex CIC is pleased to announce its involvement in a new £12.5m project designed to ‘revolutionise’ healthy ageing. The Peoplehood project — originally called Blackwood Neighbourhoods for Independent Living — will help people to stay well and physically active as they age and explore new products and services to support them.

Supported by £6m UK Research and Innovation funding as part of its Healthy Ageing Challenge’ and led by Blackwood Group, the project will work with residents and partners in three neighbourhoods to enable people to live independently, including new homes, a design guide to improve upgrading accessibility and adaptations of existing homes as well as future home design.

It will include accessible outdoor spaces so that people can sustain physical activity, supported by digital connectivity and infrastructure that helps security and ethical data sharing. Sustainable energy and transport will aim to reduce community carbon footprint and reduce transport costs. Individual coaching and support will help people maintain their health and wellbeing.

The long term goal is to improve peoples’ lives as they age and reducing costs of care provision.

Key role of personal data

Mydex’s role will be to provide the data sharing infrastructure to enable individuals and service providers to safely and efficiently share the right data at the right times, in ways that protects individuals’ privacy and puts them in control of their data at all times and enable two way engagement and feedback throughout the project.

Through every aspect of the project, all personal data relating to each individual will be delivered to and accessed from the individual’s personal data store. All parties collecting or using any personal data will send it to the individual’s personal data store via a secure API, and will have a data sharing agreement designed to achieve the highest standards of data protection, transparency and control for the citizen.

Connecting to Blackwood’s CleverCogs digital system, participating residents will be able to organise their services, care and medical appointments, stay in touch with family and friends via video calls, and listen to music and entertainment. For customers living in Blackwood Home, the system can also be used to control everything from lighting and heat to opening doors and blinds.

The three neighbourhoods chosen to take part are located in Dundee, Glasgow, and Moray. Other partner organisations, besides the lead Blackwood, are:

• Canon Medical Research Europe
• Carebuilder UK
• CENSIS
• Cisco International Ltd
• Enterprise Rent-a-Car UK
• Lewis & Hickey Architects
• The DataLab
• The University of Edinburgh