15 November 2019

Pilot activities in Barcelona, Spain

Start date: January 2020

Expected end date: April 2020 – Actual end date: February 2021

Due to the COVID-19 outbreak, pilot site activities have been seriously slowed down: installations and face-to-face support were affected during the lockdown phase. Nevertheless, the NESTORE users benefitted from the remote support of the NESTORE team and the visit restrictions allowed a more extensive pre-testing of the system in labs, at all benefit for the final testers.

Location: Barcelona, Spain

Pilot organiser: Fundació Salut I Envelliment (FSiE - www.uab.cat/fundacio-salut-envelliment)

Contact person: Laura Fernández Maldonado via email or phone ((+34) 93 433 5020 or 93 433 5077).

FSiE is contributing to improve health, and the aging process through research, innovation, knowledge transfer and management activities, but also assessing public policies. Thanks to its network it started in June to contact participants candidate that will be engaged in NESTORE pilot study. But also, it developed a social media campaign to provide details of the study to their audience and pre-recruited participants. In this moment it has been engaged several institutions such as a Third Age University, Civic centers, volunteer institutions, leisure associations, health primary care centers, etc.

The pre-pilot co-design activities

Users’ activities started in February 2018. Fundació Salut i Envelliment UAB (FSiE) facilitated five activities in which 47 participants got involved to share their views, preferences and needs regarding the use of technologies in daily life (‘Exhibition in a Box’ methodology). Five co-design activities have been organized to collect opinions and experiences about prototype use in order to improve the NESTORE system. In concrete, Spanish users were recruited to test the pathways and tangible coach, the nutrition app and chatbot and to prioritize coaching activities.

Preparation of the pilot study

During 9 months 656 individuals were contacted. From this group 100 person were interviewed and 61 agreed to be screened. Only 32 met the elegibility criteria. From this group, 20 were allocated in the intervention group which received the NESTORE system and 10 in the control group which received educational materials related to health promotion and active ageing developed by FSiE (in paper or online).

The screening phase started from November 2019 and because of the SARS-COV pandemic it was extended until October 2020.

The pilot implementation

COVID-19 impacted also the baseline assessments and installations that started from February 2020 to October 2020. The final assessments started from June 2020 to 15th January 2021.

In March 2020 due the COVID outbreak it was agreed to stop the Project waiting for the reduction of social restrictions and the state of the alarm. During the confinement period the pilot sites have maintained close and direct contact with the older people participating in the pilot study to know more about their health and well-being status. But also, those participants who has been installed with the system were trained to maintain the wearable batteries.

During the summer 2020, the pilot sites progressively scaled back their activities. One of the first actions was to develop decalogue Safety first, which defined the priority aspects that observed in the pilot study to preserve the safety of both participants and the research team. Besides, the pilot study risk mitigation plan was updated.

During the month of July 2020, some activities of the pilot study were re-initiated, but the most important part has been carried out from September 2020 to January 2021.

Precisely, in September 2020 devices were collected from those participants that finalized their participation in the study, meanwhile it was reinstalled the system in those homes were the intervention continued.

From September to November 2020, it was a period of convergence of assessments, installations and incidences solving. Finally, the main part of the final asssessments took place from 7th to 15th January 2021 in the respect of all safety conditions.

After the final assessment, an online discussion group with 9 participants from the intervention group to discuss topics related to their experience using NESTORE system and their views about usability and IT acceptance.