Systemic evaluation of actions toward developing practical broadband applications for elderly and people with disabilities

The paper reports results of a structured democratic dialogue Co-Laboratory that aimed to explore actions that could alleviate obstacles preventing the development of practical broadband applications for elderly people and people with disabilities. Thirty-three experts representing stakeholders from 20 European countries and one from the USA participated. The same experts had participated in an earlier Co-Laboratory that aimed to identify obstacles, which prevent practical broadband applications from being produced and utilized. Each participant contributed one or more actions. Contributions were subsequently clustered and prioritized using a structured process. Relationships among actions were systematically studied using Interpretative Structured Modeling. The process resulted an influence map from which it is concluded that eight actions have the greatest influence (i.e., capable of producing maximum impact), and stakeholders should therefore focus their efforts on these actions: #26: "Provide empirical rather than anecdotal evidence that evaluation/testing makes products easier to use for everyone"; #25: "Provide an agenda for industry by unifying the disability community around a clear set of expectations, requirements, and principles"; #3: "Hold workshops in each country that encourage disability representatives to agree on a common set of accessibility measures"; #1: "Help formulate specific design requirements based on user needs"; #2: "Create consensus among the handicapped community about accessibility-related products and services and their market potential"; #20: "Promote inclusive laws and standards at the European level that cannot be avoided by European countries"; #14: "Find ways to influence public attitudes and create political will for actions'; #24: "Provide examples of instances where designing inclusively has benefitted business."

Digital Telehealthcare Services: Exploring Future Designs of Innovative and Sustainable Service Business Models (35)

The rising elderly demographic in the UK represents a significant challenge in terms of planning for the efficient use of increasingly expensive and constrained health and care resources. Digital technology-enabled assistive living health and care (Telehealthcare) services could potentially serve to address the problem. Review of academic and practice literature suggests that one of the key barriers of large scale adoption of Telehealthcare technologies remains lack of evidence around \u27business cases\u27, creating enough value for all the stakeholders involved. Drawing perspectives from the literature on business model and service innovation, we adopt a value-driven approach that focuses around both value creation and value capture for key stakeholders and explores opportunities for value co-production with service users, network partners, collaborators and regulators to design future Telehealthcare service business models. Using a single case study with exploratory and interpretive focus, we empirically contextualise our value-driven investigative framework and present our findings that recognise critical needs for resource recombination and integration across the service ecosystem – such as the need for information flows and governance across the service ecosystem towards an integrated health and care information infrastructure

Grants Information: Funders, Resources, and Grant Writing Tool - 11-Oct-13 Hurricane Sandy

Intended for New York nonprofits affected by Hurricane Sandy, this guide lists foundation, corporate, government grantmakers. It also includes a list of local disaster-related agencies, and information on how to construct a proposal

Studies on Inequalities in Information Society. Proceedings of the Conference, Well-Being in the Information Society

Siirretty Doriast

State of Play of Digital Games for Empowerment and Inclusion: A Review of the Literature and Empirical Cases

This report presents the 'state of play' of knowledge of how digital games can work as empowerment tools to support social inclusion processes and policy. The report brings together for the first time a review of theoretical and empirical research in a variety of disciplines, especially from learning, social inclusion, e-inclusion and innovation studies to build a framework to help understanding of the potential of games for inclusion and empowerment. It uses this framework to analyse seven well-documented case studies from across the spectrum of digital games for empowerment and inclusion to understand between the factors contributing to their success or failure. It draws conclusions as to the principal challenges, identifies knowledge gaps, and recommends potential action by stakeholders to address these challenges.JRC.J.3-Information Societ

Designing value creating and sustainable business models: An investigation of telehealthcare service ecosystem in North East England

A rising elderly population in England, together with the prevalence of long-term chronic health conditions and higher demands for social care, is creating significant challenges for both the English National Health Service (NHS), and for Local Authorities. These challenges relate to the effective planning, commissioning and provisioning of services for people with complex social and health care needs, amidst a predominantly public-funded health and care system. Digital technology innovations, such as telecare and telehealth (telehealthcare) can facilitate assisted living through technology-mediated preventions, early detections of risks, timely interventions, and self-directed care. Policymakers acknowledge the potential of these technologies to drive greater operational efficiency and cost savings by supporting the policy agenda of ‘ageing in place’, as opposed to an increasing reliance on commissioning expensive institutional provisions such as care homes. In order to realise the opportunities of technology-enabled care, policymakers have started advocating faster adoption, provisioning and implementation of telehealthcare services on an increased population scale. A review of the relevant health technology and systems literature indicates that prior and current research does not sufficiently address the business model and service perspectives, which are considered critical to the practical justification and adoption of complex health service innovations such as telehealthcare. This research study and thesis brings together two interdisciplinary and complementary theoretical frames, synthesised from the extant literature on business models and service innovation. A new theoretical framework is developed in order to examine, interrogate and explain the phenomena of value creation and value realisation within a telehealthcare service ecosystem. Conventional business model-based thinking focuses on value propositions and the financial realisation of value. In contrast, service-dominant logic offers more relational and systemic insights on value co-creation (emphasising social as well as economic factors) through stakeholders’ resource integration within the entire service ecosystem. Using the principles of Critical Realism (CR) to inform a case study approach, this qualitative study employs a multiple case-based research design, resulting in five case studies of telehealthcare services (including one pilot) in the North East of England. The analysis of empirical data collected from the case studies, including a representative sample comprising forty key-informant stakeholder interviews, combined with documentary and observational evidence, reveals four main themes. In the next stage of analysis, following a critical realist perspective, abduction and retroduction based reasoning are applied, leading to a theoretical explanation concerning the underlying structures and their causal powers (mechanisms). Three most significant causal mechanisms, namely Organisational Inertia, Fragmented Ecosystem, and Quasi-market Characteristics, have been identified to explain the stratified reality within a telehealthcare service ecosystem. This research analysis results in both theoretical, and practitioner related contributions concerning the development of a typology for telehealthcare service business models with illustrations of three archetype business models and their related elements. These archetype models signify the dynamic possibilities or potential variations of business models and new service designs contingent upon the operational contexts in which the business models are to be situated