Founded over 60 years ago, Förenade Care is a family business with over 9000 employees.
In elderly care, they have always prioritized the wellbeing of their care recipients and constantly strived towards finding new means of providing them with a meaningful everyday life.
Förenade Care saw the potential of welfare technology as a means of finding new and meaningful activities for their clients. When people reach a certain age, both physical and mental restrictions and limitations are common.
Therefore it was important for Förenade Care to use welfare technology that would not demand too much of their users in practice.
At the start of 2020, Förenade Care started using the ViroteaVR ervice to provide their care recipients with a meaningful activity. ViroteaVR is simple to use and doesn’t require any previous skills or technical knowledge in order to fully experience VR.
The care recipients can visit places from all over the world, such as London, Paris or go on a safari in Africa. Additionally, they may visit local places and environments. To sum up, Förenade Care has successfully implemented Virotea’s VR services as a means of providing meaningful and stimulating activities.
The users have claimed to feel more motivated and curious. Individuals suffering from aphasia, or loss of speech, have shown clear bodily expressions of excitement and joy after using ViroteaVR. The activities have successfully been used to break free from unstimulating ruts of everyday life, and are now considered as something the care recipients look forward to using.
The municipality of Höör operates nursing homes and LSS homes throughout the municipality and has implemented welfare technology in order to provide their clients with meaningful everyday lives.
The municipality needed help in finding welfare technology suitable to their needs and challenges. A top priority was to find something that could include several care recipients simultaneously and be used as group activities. The goal was to tend to the needs of everyone, not just a specific target group.
The use of VR could slightly differ between the different operations. Individuals with special needs in LSS housing operations were interested in gaming and going on rollercoaster rides. They also wanted to see different things according to their personal interests and hobbies, among them trains and cars. Users at the senior nursing homes showed more interest in visiting geographical locations, often times local places which they had visited earlier in life to awaken old memories. To the caregivers, Virotea’s VR services are very easy to use. All they need is a stable internet connection and the VR headset to get started.
The results were very positive, both regarding the seniors nursing homes and the LSS housing operations. As the senior residents watched the caregiver personnel demonstrate the VR headset first, they quickly got used to the idea and wanted to try for themselves. The end result was positive.
In the LSS housing operations, many residents had a ”wow” experience and thought it was really exciting. The session became a motivating force for them to start moving and several of them were looking forward to using VR again. The personnel says that they really can see that the residents light up and become excited when it’s time to use the VR glasses.
Vardaga is one of the most prominent actors in Swedish senior care. Vardaga operates under the motto ”we make the world a little better, one human at the time”, which means that they are always striving to improve the organization and make everyday life a meaningful and comfortable experience for their care recipients.
A sense of quality and innovation has always been characteristics of Vardaga. During the process of introducing welfare technology in their operation, the greatest obstacle so far has been the implementation itself. It’s important that the technology is simple to use and easy to understand. At the end of the day, it’s the caregivers that are responsible of sharing and introducing the technology to the care recipients. Therefore, Virotea has been making sure that the implementation process is smooth and seamless, making life easy for both caregivers and recipients.
In 2018, Vardaga chose to start a collaboration with Virotea by offering our VR solution to their care recipients. Together, we shaped and developed the ViroteaVR service, which today is tailor made to fit nursing homes and special needs operations. The focus and priority lie with the recipients, but the caregiving personnel are next in line. Small learning curves and user-friendly solutions are important, and with that comes an activity that is put to good use.
The implementation of welfare technology and the ViroteaVR service has resulted in care recipients having been given the opportunity to experience geographical locations from all over the world, while at the same time, initiation and maneuvering of the VR session is an easy task for the personnel. The service can be used as a group activity with two or more VR headsets being used simultaneously, which not only saves time, but also strengthens the social bonds between the users and promotes a sense of companionship and community.
The personnel explain how users with impaired memory function have had a positive experience with ViroteaVR: ”they remember things like, ’I used to go here with my mom and dad’ or ’I visited this place with my late husband’”.
Vardaga also explains how social interactions between care recipients develop during the VR sessions and that the users often tend to open up and become talkative.
Easy-to-use welfare technology
VR as a group activity
Custom made for health services
Valuable and stimulating for memory impaired users