D-Care Labs addresses the fundamental needs of home care beneficiaries, which are not satisfied by current social service providers. There are extensive requirements to fulfil needs e.g. as proper medical therapies and support for body hygiene, provision of adequate home facilities to prevent falls and measures to enable social inclusion of needy people into the local community. 

Our project intends to address these challenges by establishing specialized macro-regional D-Care Lab innovation structures to enable social service providers, product developers and social start-ups to design and implement better and innovative home care services and products for elderly persons, people with disabilities and children with special needs. 

The main objective of D-Care Labs is to strengthen the implementation of innovative social services in the domain of home care. The Transnational Lab Strategy is based on an analysis of beneficiary needs (incl. needs caused by the Coronavirus), innovation potentials and intends to identify complementary interregional resources.

The main result of D-Care Labs is the establishment of a Transnational Lab of the Labs which will offer a framework for the incubation of the Regional Labs and a community of practice to increase mutual learning and transnational co-creation. The setup of ecosystems of social investment will provide financial and entrepreneurial support structures. During the pilot actions of 9 regional labs, innovation structures will be tested and improved. 

Caritas Vienna will be in Lead for establishing the Austrian Innovation Lab which will have an additional focus on digital solutions. It is our strong belief that the new digital technologies ranging from IOT and robotics to tele-nursing and mobile-apps open up a wide field of opportunities for new and powerful solutions also in the field of mobile car. This is why we decided to focus our Innovation Lab on digital innovations for mobile care. We will start our Innovation-Lab in 2021 with a pilot project together with local and regional partners from different fields including digital innovation, mobile care and public institutions.

D-Care Labs will help institutional actors and other stakeholders in the DTP to identify obstacles, develop and implement a plan to address them; improve institutional capacities, analyse the beneficiary needs and innovation potential as well as offer a framework for the incubation of regional labs.  

The project uses methodology to facilitate the design/implementation of community-based home care innovations (regional D-Care Lab as bottom-up, integrative, need- and solution-oriented approach) and methods to encourage interregional collaboration and co-creation (Transnational Lab, community-building approaches). The project uses tools to involve relevant policy-actors of different levels to promote policy-change in the areas of social innovation and home care.

D-Care Labs project is co-funded by the European Union Funds (ERDF, IPA, ENI).

Social media accounts of D-Care Labs: 

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/DCareLabsProject/ 

Twitter: @labs_care

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/dcarelabs/ 

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/d-care-labs  

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCYdd7HVqaRhdSYyfSwOT8tA   

Project website link:  http://www.interreg-danube.eu/approved-projects/d-carelabs  

For more information about the project turn to:

Julia Tauber-Lewisch

Contact info: Julia.Tauber-Lewisch(at)caritas-wien.at