Join our webinar: Delivering Prevention - one analogue alarm at a time

Personal alarm users create LOTS of data!

Technology Enabled Care (TEC) touches the lives of over 2 million people across the UK, in a variety of settings. Each interaction is therefore valuable to those individuals in keeping them safe and secure and allowing them to lead the life they want to lead.

Additionally, as every customer interacts with providers of TEC, they create data. This could be from an emergency call to an elderly fall alert, or even an accidental pendant activation. At Taking Care we have undertaken a programme to identify whether it is possible to use patterns within this data to predict declining health amongst our customers or service users.

To continue to drive innovation and progression in the TEC industry, we have shared through our latest insight report ‘Delivering Prevention Today’ and accompanying webinar how we use our data science driven research to deliver prevention. 

The prevention opportunity to seize today

Many discussions about prevention often revolve around the application of new digital technologies and ‘big data’.

At Taking Care we’re committed to a digital journey and as a predominately private pay business we’re already bringing innovative new digital technology to our customers. But equally most of our existing customers are analogue customers.

We believe we shouldn’t have to wait for ‘sometime’ in the future to support our customers and service users with proactive, preventative care. Instead of waiting, possibly for years, to build a robust data set from digital TEC, we should be able to reap the benefits of a long-term collection of data around the usage of analogue personal alarms – where the true definition of ‘big data’ spans back over 35 years.

Harnessing the power of dark data

We referenced the work of Professor David Hand at Imperial College, London who talks about ‘dark data’ – the data sitting ‘hidden’ inside organisations that no one thinks has value.

David suggests the key to unlocking a whole set of new value from this forgotten data is simply to ask the right questions.

The consequences of dark data can be catastrophic, in terms of both lost lives and lost fortunes. But the promise of dark data can be substantial – in all ways, including health and finance.

Profesor David Hand
Imperial College London

We took this as an inspiring challenge and commissioned a team of data scientists to investigate five years’ worth of anonymised personal alarm button presses from our private pay customers, the reasons for those presses and cancellation of the service. 

What we wanted to discover was, if by analysing the frequency, timing, and nature of call interactions, was it possible to identify patterns in the data associated with a higher risk of declining health? Furthermore, was it possible to establish a progression of need that may involve interaction with Adult Social Care, and when – effectively providing a ‘pipeline of need’ indicator for social care?

The results from the analysis were hugely enlightening and gave a clear indication of being able to predict both death and moving to a care home based on analogue data. What we thought would be a great predictor, the frequency of 999 calls, didn’t feature as a reason at all – in fact the indicators were far more subtle.

Webinar – ‘Delivering prevention. One analogue alarm at a time’

Join us at 10am on 22nd June 2023

We’ve published our findings in our ‘Delivering Prevention Today’ insight report to help apply a similar process to your analogue data.

Collect your copy and join us at our webinar 'Delivering prevention. One analogue alarm at a time' at 10am - 11am, 22 June 2023, where Steve Gates, Managing Director, and Daniel Lennox, Head of Sales and Marketing, will explore how you can start to predict and be proactive using your current data and keep people safe right now.