Project Overview

Social connection is a term describing many aspects of how individuals connect to each other. In older adults, social connection is important for quality of life and physical and mental health. Social connection is also an indicator of the quality of care provided within retirement homes and long-term care homes.

This project brings together researchers in the areas of social connection and real-time location systems and established technology (Tenera Care) and aged residential care (Shannex) industry partners, with the aim of evaluating and implementing social connection analytics based on location data collected routinely from a nurse call system.

In a pilot study, we have demonstrated that the social behaviours of older adults on a dementia unit can be tracked over time using real-time location data from a nurse call system. We will expand on this pilot to three different units in a retirement home to confirm the validity of our findings across aged residential care settings and in people with and without dementia, using a new and well-validated social connection assessment tool, SONNET.

The outcome of this project will be the co-design and implementation of social connection analytics within an existing nurse call system dashboard. These new clinical analytics will have an important and direct impact on the ability of aged care providers to identify those older adults in need of support to improve their social connection. This project is also an important step in advancing the technology readiness of clinical analytics based on location data in aged residential care.