Careables facilitates co-design of open healthcare for people with physical limitations. People’s needs regarding their physical limitations are personal, subjective and diversified. To customize healthcare solutions, a process of personalization is needed, which cannot be provided through the prevailing industrial focus of ‘one size fits all’.
The objective of Careables
Careables aims to build an ecosystem, linking existing local communities of citizens with disabilities and their families, healthcare professionals and makers and establish collaboration between these separate communities to develop their own open-source and license interventions.
Open source and open exchange to facilitate development
By providing access to open source and digital fabrication tools, Careables enables citizens with disabilities and healthcare professionals to co-produce solutions that are tailored to their special needs or disabilities, bypassing the limitations of the classical industrial production. Through open exchange of knowledge, case stories and manuals we foster an emerging ecosystem. Standards and guidelines will allow anyone to replicate formats everywhere, considering the socio-technical aspects as well as relevant legal and regulatory frameworks, quality standards, intellectual property rights implications, security, safety and privacy issues.
The long-term goal is to affiliate a community of designers, users, fablabs and makerspaces who develop similar projects and replicate events and activities to a knowledge-sharing platform that aims to achieve mass adoption and global impact.
The Glifo project
One of the project supported by Careables is Glifo: 3D printed custom aid that helps children with disabilities achieve autonomy in writing and drawing. The idea of Glifo was born to meet a specific need: to help children with a complex neurological disorder write and draw so that they could leave their marks. A need brought up to OpenDot’s team by therapists, as they witnessed how important it was for children to engage in these activities like their schoolmates did, and even more if they could do it autonomously.
To learn more about this project, click here.
Careables is coordinated by ZSI.