– Being the main character in your own life

When they are in charge of their own lives, people feel best — even when they feel worst. New Homes for Health enables people to be the main characters in their own lives.

One key aspect of being the main character in your own life is being able to feel safe and secure while living at home, even in old age or illness. In responding to this need, we started New Homes for Health. By creating a test environment in which researchers and entrepreneurs can test new products and services in all kinds of care, we hope to help elderly and disabled people to live at home for longer in the future, as well as to help people of all ages stay healthy.

Test environment with real users
In the Ljura area in Norrköping, jointly with a housing company (Hyresbostäder i Norrköping), the municipality of Norrköping and Östergötland County Council, we have developed a unique test environment comprising more than 1,200 housing units.

Here, we test a broad spectrum of healthcare and community care products and services on real people in their own homes. To date we have, for example, tested a memory panel, insulin logistics and various sound-borne services.

New Homes for Health is best suited to testing products and services in late phases of development. In conjunction with the testing, we put the finishing touches to them before a market launch. The test environment can be used by researchers, entrepreneurs and other operators to survey needs and identify new ideas, which become the objects of new research and various innovation projects.

Unique phenomenon
New Homes for Health is a unique phenomenon. Both locally and internationally, there is a shortage of effective test environments. This makes our project highly attractive to researchers and companies throughout Sweden and abroad as well. Since our start-up in 2006, New Homes for Health has hosted many national and international visits and discussions.

Aims of the project
The aims of New Homes for Health are that it should, for products related to healthcare and community care in the home:

• be Europe’s leading test environment
• help to bring about higher equality and boost market acceptance and competitiveness
• constitute a source of constantly updated information about needs.