After the US-focused launch of its Health Guide on November 10th, Intel today made a ‘softer’ launch in the European direction in the form of a press release about its launch in the UK. Gritting one’s teeth and getting past the split infinitive headline ‘Intel Announces its First Home Medical Device in the United Kingdom to Better Connect Clinicians With Patients‘ you find they have provided an interesting resource, including a video and links to various related documents.(More on these below.)
The gist of the press release will be familiar to regular Telecare Aware readers and it has a paragraph announcing that Intel has a non-exclusive marketing agreement with Tunstall, its “first official market channel partner for the Intel Health Guide” in the UK. [I wonder if healthcare providers realise they are in a ‘market channel’? Hope they have big waders on… anyway, it’s a pity Intel will have to wait until April at least before Tunstall can offer it under the PASA National Framework Agreement.]
Back to the interesting stuff… of the documents provided from the links by the press release, the 36-page Global Aging Experience Ethnography Project Report caught my eye. It was published in 2006 apparently, but I must have missed it then. It presents snapshots of lives of older people in European countries, along with digestible key facts on the health and care systems. Towards the end there is a section which reflects on different aspects of growing old and what health and independence mean. To give you a flavour, I quote this, which is followed in the report by some further significant observations.
The lived-in space is crucial to the experience of aging
People’s choice of objects to inhabit their homes, as well as less malleable aspects of architecture, location, and other aspects of the physical environment were important in how people experienced aging and health. One interesting thing to emerge from our work was a deeper discussion of why nursing homes or institutional residences were generally regarded as “bad” while staying at home is generally regarded as “good”. As we teased the attributes apart we realized that these elements characterize differences across many kinds of environments… These elements suggest interesting possibilities for technology…
Global Aging Experience Ethnography Project Report (Page 30)
Intel’s Health Guide web resource.