Innovation

The Nursing Home Club carried out its smart headboard project as part of a combined nursing home renovation and operation offer.

The Renov&Care smart headboard, which can be rapidly installed in a resident’s room, addresses the basic need in this type of healthcare facility to modernise an aging fleet of rooms, enhance the autonomy and safety of residents and facilitate the work of caregivers.

Sylvain Massin, Systems Project Manager at Cegelec 3S, tells us more about the innovation, which is currently in the prototype stage and will soon be ready for marketing.

What prompted the innovation?

The club carried out an early review of the nursing home market in France and began discussions with the ARS (Agences Régionales de Santé) regional health authorities. As we looked at the sector, we soon realised that building permits for new nursing homes had been put on hold. The authorities had instead decided to pursue broad-based modernisation of existing infrastructure. So the question we looked at was how Building Solutions business units could be part of the overall renovation programme.

We positioned ourselves with a resident room renovation solution that consists in installing a smart headboard able to incorporate systems, sensors and technologies that facilitate a resident’s daily life and autonomy.

Why did you choose a smart headboard?

The market was more focused on connected accessories for residents (such as smart watches), in other words devices that residents often found stigmatising and intrusive.

Rather than emphasising gadgets, we decided to leverage our strengths as building specialists and put together an environment that can evolve to accommodate the resident’s habits and needs. The smart headboard serves as a foundation on which we can build an evolving resident room.

This addresses the need for modernisation while accommodating the ongoing evolution of a resident’s degree of autonomy. We offer a smart headboard that is can be installed easily (attached to walls and designed with an interior finishing partner) and sufficiently rapidly (1/2 a day) to avoid impacting the life of the resident.

How does it work?

The smart headboard is based on home automation. It incorporates a number of sensors connected to a hard-wired network that:

• detects falls (via a 3D infrared sensor that scans the floor of the room, does not generate images and is therefore “GDPR compliant”)
• sends a real-time alert to caregivers in the event of unusual behaviour or a fall;
• collects and processes data in a central management system;
• replays falls with a view to improving the arrangement of the room and obtaining information on the care to be provided

What are the next steps?

In a first POC, we installed two smart headboards at the facility of our customer ADEF résidence Normandie, which particularly appreciated the test&learn approach we took with them.

We will now concentrate on marketing the solution.

Ultimately, our goal is to develop a full range of “Smart nursing home solutions and services” to provide our customers with a tool that combines all resident room data in a single operating system, the equivalent of a BOS that is entirely dedicated to the nursing home segment.

Structured data collection will enable us to provide comprehensive support for our customers and to match our technical and service operations to the practices observed within their buildings.

For further information, please contact Sylvain Massin Sylvain.MASSIN@cegelec.com
or Laura Galliker laura.galliker@vinci-facilities.com