OpenLiveNet
From Code4Pizza
What is OpenLiveNet
LiveNet is a project by Mencap to help "children and adults with learning difficulties and their carers to use ICT to improve health and wellbeing, gain access to information, connect with their community and help achieve their full potential"
OpenLiveNet aims to involve the wider tech community in Northern Ireland in the production of some of these solutions by providing MenCap with some much needed technical expertise, some development muscle and to provide something of a "many hands" approach to the aims of the project as well as much needed awareness in the wider community.
What you can do?
- Code4Pizza will be helping Mencap Northern Ireland host a 'barcamp' like event which will bring together the various interests. You can attend the camp and hopefully sign up to help with one of the projects identified.
- We're looking for some developers, designers, people with ideas and testers to help put together some of the end goals.
What's the end goal here?
The creation of user interfaces and software which are easily learned, provide meaningful feedback and can help provide an improved quality of life for individuals with learning difficulties and their carers. Such as (but not limited to) these:
- new models for web-based social network creation, interaction, identity and privacy
- mobile apps which will help with development of independence, communication and personal safety
- touchscreen applications to help with communication, creativity, learning
We expect the majority of the work to be speculative on the part of the developers and designers. Give freely of your time now and look for the opportunities to commercialise the work globally - making a difference.
Please join in!
List your name and contact details if you're willing to help
- Matt Johnston - contact details on the Me page but if you're here you probably know me
- George Moore
- Neil Kerr / Tapinside
Examples:
- a Travel Trainer app which takes the output of OpenTranslink and presents it in ways the learning impaired can appreciate. This app can have GPS, geofencing, street view, emergency assistance, a social network (with location data to find other caters in the region).
- apps for assistance in cooking, for providing artistic expression, for decision assistance, health (physical and mental) monitoring
- apps simply for communication, like Grace, but why not use this for the social network that LiveNet will create.
All of these can be commercialized worldwide.
Examples from the media of mobile+healthcare:
- iHelp for Autism - from SFWeekly
- How iPads are helping people with disabilities - brief focusing on sight disabilities
- Grace - by Lisa Domican and Steven Troughton-Smith is an iPhone and iPad app for assisting autistic individuals to communicate. It is priced at £22.99.
- Virginia - 100 year old with impaired eyesight gets iPad
- iPad as near miracle for autism - Good list of apps.
- New mental-health apps for iPhones like a 'therapist in your pocket' - these would be easy to implement on the client side? What about the server side?
