Eldercare solutions take centre stage at citizen hackathon

Citizen builders from the current run of the Build for Good hackathon in Singapore overwhelmingly - seven out of 21 teams - developed innovations to tackle eldercare problems.

Three out of five winning teams, announced at the finale event on September 28, built innovations in the eldercare category.

The problem areas identified by policymakers in the eldercare area include social isolation, as well as accessibility to healthcare and essential services.

This run marks the third and largest citizen hackathon organised by Open Government Products (OGP), the experimental development arm of GovTech Singapore.

21 teams took part in this run, an increase from the 19 from the last iteration of the citizen hackathon. With the last run tackling only sustainability issues, builders this time could choose from more diverse topics, such as digital inclusion, youth and education, cyber safety and more.

The five winning teams will each receive S$20,000 of funding and undergo an eight-week accelerator programme to scale their solutions. Their projects ranged from a matchbox-sized, non-intrusive motion detector to be placed in seniors’ homes, to a live map that indicates socially isolated seniors in one’s vicinity.

GovInsider spoke to one of OGP’s partners, Agency for Integrated Care (AIC) Care Systems Integration Division’s Deputy Chief, Chew Chun-Liang, to find out more about the value of such hackathons in public policymaking.

We also caught up with two public servants who participated as citizen builders, namely Infocomm Media Development Authority (IMDA)’s SGTraDex product manager, Enelton Satria, and a data scientist from another government agency, to understand why they were participating.

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Expanded - and deepened agency partnerships

Aside from the citizen-led innovations featured on The Straits Times, what is key to note is not only new agency partners contributing to an expanded ecosystem, but the deepening of partnerships between government and citizens, and between agencies.

OGP has partnered with the Singapore Government Partnerships Office (SGPO) in this run to link up relevant agencies with builders in the hackathon.

SGPO was set up early this year as “the first stop” for partnership between the government and citizens.

Thanks to SGPO, AIC was onboarded as a partner in this run.

With ageing concerns dominating conversations at this year’s run, AIC has been playing a more active role working alongside builders in this hackathon, both as an integrator and policy informant.

The two public servants that GovInsider spoke to, who came from different teams, pointed to individual calls they had with AIC’s Chew. AIC helped to further link up builders with key stakeholders in the eldercare ecosystem, including active ageing centres and social service agencies, he shared.

As the single national agency coordinating aged care services, AIC also has visibility and some control over the information and financial resources available to tap on for innovations and capacity-building efforts to address pain points in the ecosystem.

Policymaker woes – and where citizen expertise fits in

It’s not just crowdsourcing tech, but ideas to make these solutions work, highlighted Chew.

He noted that while there are plenty of gerontech solutions in the market, they are not scaled up due to poor understanding of senior users’ habits, as well as privacy and cost concerns.

Governments in general may be constrained by the ways they develop solutions to problems, said Chew, but citizens can think out-of-the-box when you give them the opportunity to do so.

In his capacity as an AIC representative, he advised the builders on the guardrails and what to take note of when developing tech innovations, such as keeping data collection to the minimum.

Vulnerable populations like the elderly, face unique privacy risks, Chew said. While one can put in place tech solutions to address seniors’ more immediate, physical needs, tech may also open avenues for outsiders to exploit the seniors’ vulnerability.

GovInsider earlier covered how Singapore’s National Youth Council (NYC) taps into Youth Panels – not just as another means of citizen engagement – to build the capacities of agencies to co-create policies with citizens.

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Policy partnership is a two-way street

IMDA’s Satria, said that participating as a builder enabled him to see from multiple perspectives as both the policymaker and policy recipient on the ground.

“Sometimes, it’s not as straightforward as just solving a problem... When you’re solving this problem, it might cause another and it’s unintended.

“Alot of times when citizens see a problem, they may not see it from why the problem exists in the first place and what existing efforts there are out there,” he explained.

The solutions get better when we pull together multiple stakeholders and challenge each other, he added.

Satria shared that he got to learn about the hackathon through an internal portal used by Singapore government officers to participate or contribute to cross-agency projects.

For the data scientist, the hackathon marked his first venture as a product developer, which requires a different set of skills from what he is used to.

During the hackathon, “we spent 75 per cent of our time speaking to users and doing the groundwork to find out their needs, with the remaining one and a half weeks building the product”, he said.

“Our team had a unanimous vision that we shouldn’t build tech for the sake of it,” he added, citing 50 face-to-face interactions with elderly people, as well as AIC and other grassroot organisations.