Inspired by the mandate to co-create new services to combat the “three plagues” – boredom, helplessness, and loneliness – as the true source of suffering for elders, ISM Canada partnered with long-time customer Eden Care Communities. This partnership was focused on creating a continuous innovation framework for identifying, building, deploying, and scaling innovation designed to increase the quality of life for residents and patrons of Eden Care’s facilities and programs. A critical guiding principal for this work was to co-create and co-develop multi-disciplinary partnerships. This meant that ISM Canada and Eden Care were invested at the executive leadership table and throughout the entire organization.

The first phase of the partnership included an immersive discovery phase to understand challenges and opportunities both in Eden Care’s own environment as well as within the global community of practice. This was kicked off with a trip to Denmark, a global leader in the digital health sector, to attend the Danish Digital Health Tour. The trip included activities such as touring industry-leading facilities and exchanging knowledge on leveraging technology to improve direct patient care.

Building on the momentum gained from the digital health tour, a variety of sources were consulted including technology and design thinking experts, financial support initiatives, leading experts on home care and elder support, and the staff, patrons, and families who access the services. A vision statement and guiding principals were co-created and a continuous innovation framework (including goals, milestones, and next steps, and success criteria) was prepared to meet the needs of Eden Care as they embarked on the innovation journey.

The final deliverable of the first phase was the creation of the innovation journey process with four distinct phases: Ideate & design, Iterate POCs, MVP build, and Deploy & scale. By harnessing the power of developing rapid proof of concepts and creating minimum viable prototypes, the project team was able to identify the first major project to take through the continuous innovation journey: Augmented Reality for Elders with Dementia.

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ISM Canada leveraged its partnership with the University of Regina through NSERC programs to build a team of specialists to create an Augmented Reality (AR) application in Microsoft HoloLens for care partners and people living with dementia. The project is currently at the MVP stage with an offline demo ready for clients including features such as face detection, object detection, and indoor navigation. The project team is targeting a full AR system (online and offline) ready for deployment within the next twelve months.

The creation of the program vision statement, guiding principals, and continuous innovation framework were the critical first steps on the innovation journey. These provided the foundation for industry-leading innovation centred on continually improving the quality of life for Eden Care’s residents, patrons, and their families.