Innovation: BlueAssist

Belgium and the Netherlands

AAI Domains:

• Capacity and enabling environment (use of ICT)

• Participation in society (voluntary activity, social connectedness)

Social connections and support are widely recognised as being protective factors for our health and well-being over the whole of our life course. However, there are many people who experience difficulties in making and maintaining social connections and the idea behind BlueAssist came from Ithaka, a centre for adults with learning difficulties in Ostend run by a non-governmental organisation who wanted to improve the ability of people who used the centre to travel independently and safely.

They formed a partnership project with Vilans, a Dutch voluntary organisation providing long-term care for people of all ages, and Dementia Belgium, a major national non-governmental organisation, to develop BlueAssist. There are three inter-related elements to the project that started in 2010 with a pilot project in partnership with De Lijn, a public transport provider in Flanders that runs bus services, that used blue cards with simple messages asking for assistance.

De Lijn provided training to their staff and promoted public awareness of BlueAssist on their bus network encouraging people to be helpful and understanding of people with intellectual limitations who used BlueAssist cards to ask for help. This simple idea proved to be successful and was followed by a further pilot involving older people in the early stages of dementia in Flanders and the Netherlands demonstrating that it could work for other groups of people.

In 2013 BlueAssist received €250,000 funding from public and corporate sources to promote awareness of the concept, and to develop the second and third elements of the project. The second element is encouraging individuals, businesses and communities to sign up to be BlueAssist supporters called BlueAssistants, who are prepared to be good citizens and agree to help people using the BlueAssist cards. The aim is to sign up more than 100,000 people across Flanders and to make BlueAssist a widely recognised symbol for people in need of assistance.

The third element of the innovation has been the development of a smart phone app, Cloudina, that enables a greater number of requests for assistance to be made than those limited to being written on cards along with a GPS tracking system so that the location of BlueAssist users can be monitored and they can be contacted if they experience difficulties. There are two versions of the app – a free ‘Lite’ version and a subscription based service that includes GPS tracking and support for users.

BlueAssist has been piloted in several states in the USA and in Germany, Spain, the UK as well as Israel and Qatar showing that it has the potential to operate in different cultures around the world.

In relation to active ageing, an important element of Blue Assist is that it makes the wider public more aware of people experiencing difficulties in public situations and encourages them to be good citizens and voluntarily perform an act of kindness by assisting. It enables people of all ages with cognitive limitations to be able to travel more safely and thus enables an important element of independent living.

These hi-tech apps are a good example of the use of ICT to empower people with a variety of disabilities to travel independently and to ask for assistance in a variety of social situations. Most importantly, BlueAssist encourages stronger social connections for the benefit of people who experience difficulties in fully participating in social life.

Websites

BlueAssist

BlueAssist on Facebook

Cloudina