Nokia NFC Technology Improving the Delivery of Care in the Home

CarePro, a Near Field Communication product has been launched to help providers of home based care services manage their care staff more effectively, and provide better services to the people they care for.

Providing care to people in their own homes has now become the favoured option for delivering care, primarily to older people. This approach enables older people to stay in a familiar environment for longer, and avoid the disruption and expense of moving into residential care.

Managing the delivery of home based services is a huge task for organisations such as care providers, charities, housing associations and local authorities.

Tracking the movements of mobile staff in the field, and providing staff with the latest information about the people they are caring for are just two of the many challenges facing care providers.

Until now technology solutions to these challenges have been costly to implement, or complex and time consuming for staff to use, especially if they have varying levels of IT ability.

This is why CarePro has been developed in a unique partnership between the care and technology sectors, to provide real time management of field care teams.

CarePro uses the latest NFC technology, but in a format which is extremely simple to use, and which is easily affordable.

The Nokia mobile phones used in the CarePro solution all have NFC (Near Field Communication) touch technology built in. When the phone is used to ‘touch’ a small NFC tag located in the home, data is transferred in real-time to the online management application.

Touching a tag can also be used to trigger two way communications between the carer and their management team.

CarePro is the first NFC dedicated management application to be developed for the UK home care sector, and is the result of an innovative partnership between two leading organisations from the care and technology sectors, WELbeing and Over-C, working in collaboration with Nokia.

Care providers can find out more about CarePro by visiting the WELbeing web site at www.welbeing.org.uk. For further information regarding Over-C and its innovative use of NFC technology visit www.over-c.com.