Organisation Description:
Suara Cooperativa is a non-profit social economy company with more than 40 years of experience in the care of the people. With 4,500 professionals (88% of them women), Suara responds to the care, assistance and educational needs of a wide range of people. Its service users include children and young people, families, people who require some kind of support to be more independent, people who cannot enter the labour market or whose aim is to improve professionally, and people who need support to overcome crisis situations.
As a result, Suara manages a wide range of services and equipment: residential facilities, day and night equipment, schools and education centres, counselling services, prevention, and support services and home services, among others. Suara aims to transform the social environment, improving people’s situations by providing them with quality services rooted in the region and promoting their welfare and growth, from business projects.
Suara provides personalised medical services for each stage of life that are based on the individual needs of each person.
Activities and interest with respect to digital health:
Suara works on several aspects of digital health. Included in its initiative are a social digital lab; and various pilots and proofs of concept that cover immersive reality and the use of sensors.
Social Digital Lab
Suara Social Digital Lab is an innovation project based around social services. It seeks to respond to new needs, thanks to the creation of the first incubator specialised in the field of care in Catalonia. The lab focuses on technological experimentation, research, and support for social innovation projects. In the Social Digital Lab environment, Suara has created an immersive experience room that enables the cooperative to promote activities (such as pilots, proof of concepts, and workshops) by generating virtual environments. It provides many possibilities of the use of virtual environments in the care and well-being of people.
Pilot test: therapeutic use of immersive reality for elderly people
The cooperative runs immersive reality sessions with elderly people in the different Suara day centres. These service users are people of different ages (from 60 to 100 years) who have a level of mild cognitive impairment. Suara is developing three lines of work with technology. In the first line of work, we encourage cognitive stimulation through group reminiscence practices, in which people remember events, experiences, and places from the past. This enables the lab to work on communication, dialogue, and listening skills. The second line of work focuses on physical stimulation through basic psychomotor activities in which people interact directly with the technology. In the third line of work, we work on relaxation, using technology to improve people’s emotional well-being. All this takes place with the aim of offering stimulation and therapeutic strategies, both cognitive and emotional, that will lead later to the creation of a scientifically tested multimodal stimulation programme.
Pilots and proof of concepts with sensors
Suara provides a test bed for new Internet of Things (IoT) technologies through high-impact community projects that address the health, social and ethical issues of the people that the cooperative serves. It provides for experimentation with technologies such as voice assistants, sound sensors for the detection of dementia, social and care-based robotics in the field of ageing, virtual reality and 3D printing before incorporating them into real-life, sensory situations. We are carrying out many of these pilots with start-ups, universities, and research centres.
For more information about Suara Cooperativa and its services, visit the official website.
