During the Health Innovation Challenge Day at the Zorg41Summit, Rotterdam’s elderman Struijvenberg (Employment & Economy) handed out the award of participation in ECE’s New Business Cycle (NBC) to the team that was chosen by the jury on having the most promising idea.

With their idea (‘Safely going out and getting home again’), dementing people do not get lost anymore. They want to provide a solution based on a network of low energy bluetooth transmitters and receivers, that connects to the person’s profile in a digital platform in the cloud. By keeping track of the behaviourpatterns and whereabouts, healthcare-institutions and informal care can take direct action if something is going wrong.

By participating in the NBC-programme, the team worked on further development of the idea under the guidance of experienced innovators and coaches and by using amongst others the Business Model Canvas, Design Thinking-methodology and empathymapping. The participants have made a functional design of their service (inclusing technical and functional demans), they’ve spoken to a party who could provide the technical solutions. Final, one of the participants has pitched the idea at the idea-competition within his own company  (8.000 FTE) and is now one of the finalists in the race for backing and support in transforming the idea into reality!

Now that the participants have gone through the NBC-programme, the elderman Struijvenberg had a meeting with the winners for an update. During the meeting, the elderman got enthousiastic and wants to see if the municipalities’ force and network can be used to launch a pilot within the city of Rotterdam!

A great result and ending for the Zorg41 Health Innovation Challenge 2015!