Over the 36 months, Mobile-Age undertook in-depth situated practice studies in four European locations. The aim has been to develop services that are meaningful and accessible to older adults, to identify existing open data sets and to open up new open data, and to develop demonstrator applications that can be exploited. This led to more than 310 older adults actively participating across the four field sites along with 36 collaborating organisations (government, not for profit and private sector). This resulted in innovative mobile demonstrator apps being developed across four countries. In the UK, a loneliness and social isolation service assists older adults to participate in social events and volunteering opportunities. The app provides information about weather and hours of daylight, age-friendly maps showing benches, bus stops and accessible toilets, and links to relevant bus and train timetables. In Germany, a digital guide provides multi-media information about the district such as nice walks and points of interest. In Spain, collaborative maps co-created with older adults allow them to access and use open spatial data to become more familiar with their neighbourhood and make proposals for its improvement (i.e. reporting problems for repair). In Greece, an app provides data about hospitals, doctors and chemists, their locations and opening times, out-of-hours health services and appointment booking.
A further key outcome has been the development of a conceptual framework and guide to creating pathways to meaningful access to services for all older adults. This comprises of first identifying what is meaningful by studying what older adults do or seek to do, and once established, creating pathways to access meaningful services. Opening and joining up data about transport, benches, toilets etc. can support pathways to accessing services. Recognising that older adults might not be independent users of technology, the strategy also focused on mediated access to services. This approach contrasts with the long established approaches that focus on training older adults to “catch up”.
The Mobile-Age Development Environment represents a key innovation. It enables efficient development of apps specifically for older adults. It includes: a data search component for app developers to discover and integrate open government data sets; a semantic annotations component for online collaboration to annotate these to generate five-star datasets or knowledge graphs; an analytics component enabling collection of data on both digital and physical user interactions across apps, to better understand and refine app interactions; and a concept lookup component linking dictionaries or glossaries to apps.
We created an interactive co-creation good practice guide. It documents the Mobile-Age co-creation methodology, good practice examples, methods and resources. A key component is the evaluation framework, which distinguishes between short-term outputs within the co-creation project timeframe from outcomes and impacts that take place subsequent to co-creation. We developed a methodology to identify pathways to impact as part of a co-creation project. A co-creation management platform enables structured monitoring of co-creation, automatic generation of analytics, and access to resources.
