The PAS (pôle autonomie santé) project offers with L’ETAPE a free municipal public service dedicated to supporting the population (older and/or handicapped people and their family or professional caregivers) in the choice and testing of technical and technological aids to maintain independent living.

This project is managed by the city of Lattes’ Social Welfare Centre.

Since 2009, around 5000 persons (handicapped individuals, social workers, family members) visited L’ETAPE.

Given its mission of technology watch and referencing of innovative solutions for autonomy, L’ETAPE collaborates with approximately one hundred companies in order to test and demonstrate their products in his show room.

This mission enables L’ETAPE to work with these companies to develop protocols of experiment and feedback in ecological situation with regards to their innovative solutions.

For this purpose, L’ETAPE has created a collaborative platform on the model of the living labs enabling it to mobilize upon request its partners network (user associations, SSIAD, medico-social institutions, etc.) to bring their expertises in process innovation and evaluation collaborative in ecological situation of technical or technological solutions for autonomy.

Since 2014, 3 projects are underway, including one project with a start-up incubated by the Montpellier BIC to evaluate at home a device of remote vigilance of people with cognitive disorders based on a network of non-intrusive sensors, and two projects with a group of companies, one on the design of a prototype of a universal remote control for healthcare beds, other on benchmarking at home of transfer and standing devices for bedridden.

The advantage of this approach is to promote and to grow the expertise of ground stakeholders (users and professionals) to help companies develop innovative solutions perfectly adapted in their uses in “real life”.

At the regional level, the living lab of L’ETAPE is working in a network with the 2 living labs “Kyomed and I2ML”, in the Regional Forum Living Labs “health and autonomy”.

www.etape-pole-autonomie-sante-lattes.org/.