Health Lounge
12:30 - 13:30
English
Meetup
Beginner
Tech for Good
Careables: Open Source Health Hardware | Ideation Session

Short thesis

Calling all makers, care recipients, and healthcare professionals!

What are your ideas for connecting the urge for patients and care professionals to design more customized and tailor-made solutions with the maker movement? Makers are designing open hardware as product design is being democratized, opened up and becoming accessible for a growing community. How can patients and care professionals benefit from these developments? Join us for a brainstorming session at rp:Accra!

Description

In the Careables project, Fab Labs and makerspaces collaborate with patients and professionals to create personalized solutions and open source knowledge that will improve the lives of many patients and professionals. Accessible, comprehensive and easy to use open source hardware are being documented, collected and shared through the central platform Careables.org. This platform is growing into a central hub and functions not only as repository for well documented open hardware projects. It offers many different communities a place to connect and exchange knowledge, needs and co-create solutions.

It's easy to think of open hardware solutions that make a difference in people's lives. An example of this is OPEN LIGHTS. This project offers people in wheelchairs an open source solution for wheelchair specific light that make them better visible at night. OPEN LIGHTS offers wheelchair users adjustable hardware that can be built with most common DIY technologies.

In our brainstorming session at rp:Accra, we want to bring together all the makers, care professionals and patients that attend the conference. Possible questions are:

  • What are challenges you face every day as a patients or care professional?
  • What are solutions you would like to build - but don't know how?
  • How could you use your existing makerspace to foster exchange and collaboration in health and care?

 

Careables is managed by the Made4You project and has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No. 780298.