Homes for Healthy Ageing Programme Partner Announcement

Connected Places Catapult is pleased to announce its partnership with the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) Innovation Hub on the Homes for Healthy Ageing Programme. The ICO’s Innovation Hub supports data protection compliance where there are new and novel uses of personal data by helping innovators adopt a privacy by design approach to their products.

Through our Homes for Healthy Ageing programme, we have built a framework to trial and demonstrate innovative solutions to some of the country’s most pressing healthy ageing challenges across 5 UK testbeds to encourage greater horizontal collaboration across the healthy ageing ecosystem. We recently confirmed the SMEs who have been selected to tackle the challenges within our first two testbeds: Cold and Damp Homes in Sunderland; Social Isolation and Loneliness in Northern Ireland. The selected SMEs will test and develop their solutions with end users in both testbeds.

The programme will benefit from the ICO Innovation Hub’s experience in demonstrating how privacy compliance can be built into these innovations saving time and cost. To ensure privacy considerations are at the forefront of the developers’ minds the ICO has delivered a privacy workshop and will be on hand to support innovators so that the Homes for Healthy Ageing Programme can realise societal benefits though the development of trusted solutions that respect privacy.

“Working within the health and well-being space, we recognise the importance and implications that poor data management can foster if handled incorrectly. Therefore, we aim to build a trusted process that can derive insights and impact by testing SME solutions with people in a responsible way. To ensure we achieve this, we welcome the guidance, support and credibility that the ICO’s Innovation Hub can bring to the programme.”

Louise Fildes, Applied Data and Technology Director, Connected Places Catapult

“Innovative uses of personal data have the potential to improve our lives and those of the people we care for if privacy is an integral part of their design and is trusted. The ICO wants to see assistive technologies and data-driven innovations designed to the privacy standards every member of the public would expect. Our Innovation Hub supports innovators to develop compliant products and the best solutions for business and for the public.”

Lynne Currie, Head of Innovation, Information Commissioner’s Office