In November 2022, Challenge Works held two virtual hackathons to bring together innovators, dementia care experts and people living with dementia. The aim was to help innovators understand how they can successfully enter the Longitude Prize on Dementia and make the most of the opportunity to learn from those with lived experience of the condition with the goal of ultimately driving life-changing impact through innovative solutions.
Human-centred innovation is core to the long-term success of solutions entered into a prize. They must be designed with the end beneficiaries firmly in mind. They need to ensure they fulfil a true need and that they work in a way that the user wants – that means including end users in the design, iteration and product development of a technology. Across multiple prizes in multiple areas of innovation, human-centred solutions have resulted in better adoption and, in turn, long-term success for their creators.
Including people living with dementia, and their loved ones and carers, in the ideation and product development process provides an enormous opportunity for innovators. Their insights unearth the true challenges that new assistive technologies might solve.
The Longitude Prize on Dementia and Alzheimer’s Society are working directly with people affected by dementia at every stage of the development process, to ensure co-creation of innovations throughout. This includes the prize’s co-creation group who have helped us design the prize and the lived experience advisory panel which will launch early 2023 for the judging process.
The hackathons were a key moment to kick-off the connection between innovators and people living with dementia to foster human-centred solutions.
