Vide Trygghet – ensuring security and freedom by connecting generations
171%, the annual growth rate of people over 75 using smartphones for the past four years. At the same time more and more elders are experiencing a feeling of loneliness. Despite this, the adaptation of the digital society for this societal group is incredibly slow. We at Vide Trygghet are therefore working diligently to arrive at a change by offering a unique opportunity for elderly people to ensure their well-being, share their health status and meet new people.
This all started a few months back when we — Isak, Axel and Mattias — were having a bad conscious for not keeping in contact with our grandparents regularly. So, in February this year we all came together and started brainstorming on what we can do to solve this. We started out with a simple question: how do we get our elders to contact us every day letting us know they are up and doing well?
Having brainstormed ideas, let go of ideas, discussed with elderly associations, listened to good advices, studied statistics and exchanged ideas with our family and friends we now have a solution!
Vide Trygghet is simple to use, as cheap for the individual as for the society and creates daily security for all parties involved! One of our early bird of a grandmother would like to “check in” at around seven in the morning while her friend prefers to check in at ten o’clock. They have chosen three independent and free of choice contacts. Each of them finding out within half an hour if their relative or friend has not yet checked in.
We have since February developed and fine tuned our service. Rather soon we got in contact with Drivhuset at Stockholm’s University who was incredibly supportive, giving us advice and necessary means to continue our development. After a few months of progress we applied for participation in the Boost Startup Journey in Turku. We became extremely happy and empowered when we got the chance to work with coaches with a number of different areas of expertise guiding us into the right direction.
As the demand is there and the market is organically growing, we are convinced and even more encouraged to satisfy more of elders needs with a number of other services. For example, have your mom or dad paid the bills, taken their medicine or done their exercise? Are there neighbours with similar interest who they can meet to grab a coffee or discuss relevant social topics with?
As we all wish for elders loneliness to decrease and have expertise within software engineering, business management and sale strategy, we strongly believe we are the right team for the job!
Now being in August and having successfully tested the app with a number of elders we are really looking forward to the launch of the Vide Trygghet App at the end of the month. Our aim is to reach as many as possible in Sweden before we move on to our neighbouring countries, Finland and Norway.
Please check out our new website videapp.se to learn more about our past and future journey and download our app Vide Trygghet at Play Store and App Store!
Thank you!
Written by Isak Hjärne