Why is it important?

The SCAMPI toolkit will help keep people with dementia and Parkinson’s live independently at home, with the best quality of life possible. It will also seek to relieve pressure on an increasingly overstretched NHS, by delivering more efficient, effective, patient-centred care in the community. New intelligent technologies have the potential to support self-care and reduce the need for routine interventions from paid professionals, keeping costs down for both self-funders and the public purse alike.

What is it?

The SCAMPI project will develop a new form of computerised toolkit that will allow someone with a chronic condition living in their own home, together with their relatives, carers and healthcare professionals, to self-manage their daily and meaningful activities. People will interact with the new toolkit through a novel user interface that comprises an intelligent visual plan for their daily living.

A daily living plan is a document about the person’s goals and qualities to maintain or work towards, and the desired activities such as eating, exercising and socialising. SCAMPI’s new form of plan will be visual, natural and simple-to-use, enabling a person with a chronic condition to customise their daily life according to their individual needs and preferences, with pro-active support for thinking about important goals as well as how to achieve those goals. The person using the toolkit will also be able to share the plan with named carers and targeted healthcare professionals such as specialist nurses and their GPs, and make joint decisions about customising the plan so that the person’s needs can be met more effectively, even when these other people are elsewhere.

Moreover, the plan will update regularly from discreet and cost-effective sensor devices around the person’s home. Using the available data from these sensors as input to artificial intelligence algorithms, the person will be able to monitor the degree to which the goals as specified in the plan are being achieved. Feedback on the achievement of these goals will be provided through the user interface along with recommendations when a goal is not being achieved.

Who is it for?

We are working closely with people with dementia and/or Parkinson’s as well as their informal carers. We are also consulting with housing, health and social care professionals about how they could use such a toolkit in their work.

Who is involved in the project?

To develop and evaluate this new computerised toolkit, we have formed a team of leading researchers in Computer Science, the Health Sciences and Digital Business at City, University of London.

We also work closely with the Alzheimer’s Society  and Parkinson’s UK.

To maximise impact from SCAMPI, the team will work with London-based Clinical  Commissioning Groups (CCGs), NHS Sutton CCG and and the CWHHE Collaborative (Central London, West London, Hammersmith and Fulham, Hounslow and Ealing Clinical Commissioning Groups).

Digital entrepreneurs Evalucom Consulting  will seek to commercialise the research results so that the elements of the toolkit can be made quickly and widely available.

How long will it run?

We started this project on 1 March 2017 and it will last 3 years. In the first 12 months, we  focused on co-designing the toolkit with people with chronic conditions and their carers. We have bulit a ready-to-use version that we are evaluating in field trials in the last 6 months of the project.