The Market of Caring Things Seminar.

The Internet of Caring Things held its first seminar of 2023

It was a great day at the UK National Innovation Centre for Ageing today which saw discussions and presentations around the “Market of IOCT”, one of the events within our programme at Internet of Caring Things (IoCT). The day was a good chance to share the progress of the first year of work of the programme by showcasing some of the latest companies who have joined us. It also enabled us to shine a light on the broad range of products and services that the IoCT intend to scout, sustain and promote.

Inspiring discussions

We had the chance to discuss and compare experiences, to learn and to be inspired by each other. Care providers, investors and local authorities had the opportunity to speak directly to IoCT companies about the opportunities and challenges. It was the ideal opportunity for some of the VOICE members, part of the Advisory Panel on the IoCT programme to meet the companies they have provided feedback for in the past and see how the companies had benefitted and applied the advice given to them.

Speakers

To assess and state the market opportunity we hosted an outstanding keynote from Nick Rosa – Metaverse Strategy Lead Europe & Growth Markets at Accenture) who shared his vision about the Metaverse as an infrastructure where – within the multiple layers – opportunities and challenges are all to be explored. Nick was keen to show how the metaverse will “bleed into reality”.

From hyper-realistic avatars to their integration with LLM the message from Nick was ‘Co-creation with people should always be at the heart of any solution we want to deploy, whatever the technology”. A key message that we endorse every day at NICA and incorporate into everything we do.

Laurie Orlov, (HomeWatch Networks) shared her twenty years’ experience on the potential of the IoT market for an ageing demographic. Laurie sees in the IoCT’s paradigm a possible way to more meaningfully translate the opportunities for the public, focusing on the benefit and on what people “care about”.

Next, we hosted Yiding Star XING, Project Manager at Informetis Co. Japan, a company working with us to explore the power of the machine learning model applied to energy consumption.

Josh Anderson (UXC) and Adam Cassidy ACCA (Perro) followed, talking about how much pets are an essential part of people’s lives and how by fixing a tracker on a dog, we could infer owners’ mental well-being while monitoring a dog’s health. We truly believe this as a key area of growth, and we are leading the debate on the topic.

The panel discussion

We finished with a panel discussion focusing on the crucial subject of ‘who pays for this?’ along with other important questions with Director of NICA Nicola Palmarini , Kate Patton (CBI Head of UK Cluster Policy/Strategy), Tim Barclay (Appello), Eric Kihlstrom (Centaur Robotics), Dawn Dunn (NewcastleGateshead Initiative) about the need for creating a business model for prevention.