SM4ALL Project

THFL is a non-profit domiciliary care organization offering the residents of Friesland, one of the twelve provinces of the Netherlands, a broad variety of high-qualitative care and welfare services in every phase of their life. The service aims at maintaining the personal living situation of the patient.  With over 2,200 employees and over 50,000 clients on a yearly basis. THFL is one of the largest domiciliary care organizations of the country. THFL aims at supplying custom-made services and is committed to continuous innovation by anticipating the needs of the clients and monitoring the technological trends. Its dissemination means take a number of different forms, such as the use of mass media communication (it collaborates with the local TV station Omroep Fryslān), workshop targeted to the health care specialist, or having its own Skill Lab for the training of its employees and the free lance professional caregivers.

Thuiszorg Het Friese Land (THFL, the Netherlands) - User Partner -  The partner will have a central role in the requirement engineering and will bring its expertise in deploying and assessing innovative health technologies, expertise that has been gained in other projects like the Virtual care at Home project. Furthermore, it will have the fundamental role of validation of all intermediate and final products of the project . Finally, it will contribute to the dissemination of the project  results with health organizations and actual end users.

THFL is involved in a number of regional and national projects concerning healthcare. For instance, the Virtual Care at Home a project in collaboration with an Internet Service Provider (Kabel Noord), aiming to enhance the quality of life for the elderly people or people with disabilities with the support of audio-visual and IP technology. Using TV sets and special set-top-boxes with built-in camera, microphone and Internet connection the clients can communicate with remote health-care personnel and family members. Video conference units were also installed in Ameland and in the hospital of Dokkum, enabling virtual visiting hours for hospitalized people and their relatives. Virtual medical consultations with the local diet specialists are also possible.