Peter Gore, Professor of Practice and ADL Smartcare founder
One of the first companies to locate to the Campus for Ageing and Vitality in Newcastle is ADL Smartcare.
This was founded by Newcastle University’s Professor of Practice Peter Gore and it matches elderly people to the assistive technologies they need to help alleviate physical problems and improve their quality of life.
ADL Smartcare
The ADL represents ‘activities of daily living’, explained Professor Gore – was created to provide local authorities with a much cheaper way of doing what he describes as "speed dating of technology for older people".
"We developed a real evidence based matching system for straightforward assessment of what people need. We cover 21 trillion scenarios, so that’s more than there are stars in the universe," he said.
"This covers everything from a walking frame or bath seat through to much more complex IT based aids that are about keeping a person safe and independent, for example monitoring for falls."
Professor Gore pointed out, however, that ADL’s approach is about deploying technology appropriately. "We are technology agnostic because, for example, the best and first technology for the prevention and management of falls is better footwear.
"A lot of people trip because they have bad and ill-fitting slippers. So a £20 pair of good slippers that stop you tripping is much better use of technology than a £500 monitoring device that says you fell."
Professor Gore describes himself as an innovator. He is a mechanical and design engineer by profession who devised hospital equipment, from high-tech beds and support systems through to infrastructure alarms and delivery mechanisms for medical gases.
He worked in the United States for a division of BOC Healthcare before returning to the UK and eventually helped to establish ADL in Sheffield nearly 20 years ago.
Practical experience of business and research
As a professor of practice for ageing and vitality he was recruited by Newcastle University to bring to bear his practical experience of business and research, and to "rub off some of the real world problems on academia ". ADL has drawn on the knowledge and understanding of about 200 professionals with around 4,000 years of experience between them in matching people to the technology they need.
In Newcastle the company has established its research facility in the ‘Project Hotel’ for business development, on the second floor of the new Biomedical Research Building on the Campus. After an extensive search, it chose this location as being ideal for its needs.
Head of research at the facility is retired Newcastle University professor Garth Johnson, who gained an eminent reputation as one of the UK’s top 10 ‘bioengineers’. He invented one of only two artificial shoulder joints now used around the world.
Sustained Alternative Living Technologies (SALT)
One of ADL's current projects is called SALT. "This is very broad," said Professor Gore, "but it is looking at how to create sustainable models, particularly in the light of the fact that budgets are very constrained at present.
"A lot of people don’t get the help they need until they get quite desperate. But we're about healthy ageing here, so we want to get help to people before they're desperate, because that's how they age better."
Professor Gore added that they are also addressing the important fact that a lot of technology isn’t put to proper use; people try it out, don’t like it, and give up on it. This is where ADL's use of hard evidence comes in. And a crucial part of the solution is to involve older people closely in decisions about what technologies they really need and find most useful.
"How do older people and their carers feel about adopting technology and what can we do to influence that," he says. "We're involved in that as a company because we’ve got 28 million matching decisions which can help inform that.
"It's all about understanding and personalising healthy ageing."
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