Before the Active Ageing Hackathon weekend, the StarHub Community gathered ideas to help improve the lives of seniors through the use of technology. The top three are revealed as well as a bizarre idea!

 

Prior to the Active Ageing Hackathon weekend, StarHub, one of the partners in the hackathon, engaged its 11,457-strong members of the StarHub Community by asking them to come up with ideas on how using technology can improve the lives of seniors, and vote for the best ideas. The StarHub Community is a crowd-sourcing platform where its members can ask questions and find answers from fellow users.

According to StarHub, their informal campaign, which started on August 6 and ended on August 15, garnered 96 ideas and received 2,305 votes. Those who gave ideas and voted, stood a chance to win one of four Samsung GALAXY Tab 2 7.0 tablets.

So what were the top three ideas?

1) Companionship of seniors – Shared one of the members who came up with the idea, “I believe one of the most pressing needs seniors have is simply having someone to talk to, whether it is a friend or a family member. So, an app or software that is able to meet this need would be great. One of its functions might be to match people with the same interests or hobbies. Another might be a ‘chat’ function to allow seniors to interact with anyone they wish to online.”

2) Measuring one’s heartbeat – Shared another community member: “1) For those elderly with heart problem, a device to wear on their wrist to measure their heart beat. This device will be able to link to the handphone through WIFI. If any abnormal heartbeat is detected by the device, it will automatically send an SOS from the handphone to the respective person for help. 2) Precise GPS tracking on the handphone so their families members will able to know where their elderly has gone. GPS cannot be turn off so that in the event that they lose their handphone, they are still able to track back the handphone. 3) Voice-to-message-converter so elderly can send SMS through voice.”

3) Translator – Shared another community member: “We can have a platform that understands dialect, or an application similar to a translator which converts English and other languages to dialect, Mandarin, Indian and Malay. Platform should have fonts, which allow the elderly to have a better seeing experience. In addition, the platform should add shopping list/reminder that reminds elderly about their daily lives such as taking medicine or buying groceries and daily necessities.”

An honorary mention went to this idea on shopping for aunties. Shared the community member: “Old aunties know where to find the best deals in town! Why don’t we give them a platform to actually share with us their findings? It can be a supermarket-related product or even seasonal products like mooncake or beef jerky. …”

And beyond these creative ideas, there was this idea that was on the fringe of creative, yet bizarre – QR code (barcode) to be designed on tombs. Said the community member: “Was given a thought about this – a tomb or urn that is placed within a temple, mosque or in a cemetery. Perhaps there is an option to put a QR code on it so that their younger generation will know about the good deeds of their loved ones who are deceased.”

To look at the various ideas, go to http://community.starhub.com/. According to StarHub’s Darren Choo, assistant vice-president, Social CRM, they are in the midst of consolidating the ideas and putting them onto one page. From there, they will be putting the ideas back onto the StarHub Community again for another round of voting and at the same time, getting interested developers or sponsors to take on the winning idea or ideas.

 

---