The Hablab, spearheaded by founder Cristiano Cairo, works to provide citizens with better safety and peace of mind by providing them with a way to follow their often vital treatment plans in their own homes. The care sector in Europe is under massive strain as a result of labor shortages. By 2035, the EU will be short 13 million nurses who are needed to undertake critical tasks at homes, care homes, and hospitals, according to data from healthcare researchers. Hablabs digital platform thus gives care staff better methods and more knowledge in what is of – ten a high-pressure work environment. 

“We work in a sector in which the citizens themselves must follow their treatment plans and remember many things every day, from drinking water and performing physical exercises to remembering cri – tical medicines. At the same time, caregivers do not receive the knowledge and data as to whether or not citizens complete necessary tasks when they are alo – ne,” explains Cristiano Cairo regarding the background for the Hablab. 

Communication between citizens and healthcare staff is an additional problem and one which is often hampered further by language barriers or issues such as vision and hearing impairments, memory loss, and time pressure.

 “Imagine that you are a nurse from Latvia visiting an older citizen in their home. It’s hard to com – municate and you have no information about what the citizen may or may not have done between visits,” explains Cristiano Cairo.

Sprinting out of the tunnel vision

 It is for these reasons that Hablab developed a digital platform with hardware components with unique alert sounds to remind citizens to take their medici – ne, to drink water, or to do their daily exercises. Using this platform, caregivers can track what citizens have done and also find out whether anything important may have been forgotten. Such as a citizen forgetting to take vital medicine, for example. 

“We needed a better digital solution with icons and sound alerts for things such as water or medicine, which would work for both citizens and caregivers. A process like that can risk running aground without fresh eyes from the outside to glance over and contribute,” says Cristiano Cairo on Hablab’s road into its digital sprint. 

“We are very satisfied with the sprint process and the partners we collaborated with. It’s easy to get tunnel vision and to stall in a process like this, so it was really invigorating for us to receive some help for our next breakthrough. The sprint consultants were really great at pointing out what we needed and the pro – cess advanced really quickly, but not too quickly,” explains Cristiano Cairo. The Hablab sent front-end people, their CTO, and product manager to participate in the entire sprint process, while Cristiano himself also took part in the initial stages.

Ready for international growth

In addition to improving Hablab’s platform in terms of user-friendliness and cru – cial communication between citizens and care staff, Cristiano Cairo also predicts that his company will prove itself to be in a better position than their competitors when they come to expand all across Europe. 

“For the partners that we work within the care sector, we can see that our pro – ducts have become more attractive because they work better in practical working situations. In the long-term, our user design is a stepping stone that will allow us to compete on the market,” explains the Hablab founder. In fact, the sprint method has proved so successful for Hablab that they plan to undertake yet another digital sprint in the fall.