An interesting point was brought up by one of the clinical psychologists involved in the project that we met with. The people in the trial will have really, really different views and interpretations of the same word, or in this case, ‘emotion’. It comes back to the age old philosophical argument – how do we [...]
Everybody’s different
Friday, September 3rd, 2010Distributed Care
Wednesday, September 1st, 2010One of the key aspects of Buddy Radio is the use of social media to make it easier for friends and family to be involved in the care of an individual. The service works by sharing a user’s moods with a wider network of people (than simply their care professional) – with the aim that by increasing the possibilities of social contact, we can also increase the possibilities for social care.
We’ve been thinking for a while for a useful analogy for this new approach. We toyed with the idea that we’re putting the social in social care – which has a nice ring to it, but seems a bit advertising slogan-y.
The making of Buddy shell
Friday, August 27th, 2010Not quite a full making-of documentary, but as we hold our breath counting down to the imminent release of our final Buddy prototype – I just wanted to share some glimpses into the development of the Buddy interior world which I’ve been working on for the last couple of weeks.
Although armed with a nice working [...]
Streatham to Sidekick
Thursday, August 26th, 2010Hi. My names Anant, and I’m the assistant psychologist working on the Buddy project from SLaM.
I’m supposed to blog about what it’s like for someone from the NHS (me) to work with a 3rd sector social innovation studio (Sidekick). I thought I’d start with the interesting – the work space, and then move into the [...]
Informed co-design, hardware prototypes, agile service and software design and more – it’s a mega Buddy project update!
Tuesday, August 24th, 2010methodological innovation – what we’re calling ‘informed co-design’ – is as important as the technical innovation behind the Buddy concept.
Just Enough Technology
Thursday, August 19th, 2010Someone described us as tech company in a meeting the other day. I was kind of flattered. A Technology Company. That makes us like Cisco, right? But it also made me uneasy. You see tech companies are the ones that put extra dials on a microwave like this one, when the analogue system was kind [...]
The Innards of Buddy Radio
Tuesday, August 17th, 2010We are super delighted to share a look under the bonnet of Buddy Radio. We’re in the final throes of preparing for our first iterative trial with service users. The plan is to put Buddy units in the homes of 4 service users with long term mental health problems, at the end of August. We’re fully expecting things to break, collapse and generally not work as well as we’d hope, but that’s the point of the iterative trial.
Buddy Logo on PCB. A Great Day.
Saturday, July 31st, 2010The paradox of dependency
Tuesday, July 20th, 2010I went to the launch of the NESTA/NEF mainstreaming co-production event today. Apart from the great comment by the fantastically inspiring Garath Symonds that the way to get co-production mainstream is “to, well, to do it!”, one of the most ‘hmm, that’s a thing’ type-points I picked up on was made by Philip Colligan, director [...]
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