Claude Goodman | CareWheels Corporation; and Alan DeLaTorre, PhD | City of Portland, Bureau of Planning and Sustainability; Mark Leavitt, PhD, MD | CareWheels Corporation
Competition Sponsor: National Academy of Medicine
Awardee Year: 2020
Loneliness and medication non-adherence are public health problems unsolved by conventional interventions. Recognizing these problems as interrelated offers new opportunities to develop synergistic solutions that engage elders to participate in the eldercare workforce by empowering them with holistic innovations designed to enhance their longevity. Peer to peer care services, or PeerCare, transforms elders from societal burdens into shared resources capable of expanding the eldercare workforce to meet the needs of our aging populations. Elders are one resource capable of scaling-up to meet the growing magnitude of unmet eldercare needs. PeerCare engages elders to positively impact their longevity and social determinants of health by expanding their social support networks to tackle loneliness and foster helpful relationships based on mutual support, trust, and camaraderie. It provides social incentives that improve healthy behaviors like diet and medication adherence to reduce preventable disease, emergency room, and hospital admissions. We propose to maximize the positive impact of PeerCare by innovating the CareBank: a PeerCare Platform that rewards mutual support by fostering service exchanges between elders to help them help each other age-in-place safely. The CareBank will integrate smartphones with activity sensors and social incentives to connect, detect, alert, and reward PeerCare participants. The CareBank App will connect elders to exchange PeerCare by providing real-time alerts and automatic credits for mutual monitoring and response services. It will empower elders to help save lives by detecting problems before they become emergencies, and earn money, by rewarding elders for providing equitable PeerCare services from the comfort of their home.
To learn more about this proposal email healthylongevity@nas.edu.