Tech For Good Magazine - Issue 06

INSIDE NHS’S CONNECTIVITY TRANSFORMATION SAMSUNG’S SOCIAL RESPONSIBILITY EVOLUTION HOW THE TECH4GOOD AWARDS IS EMPOWERING KIDS MEET THE APP DRIVING THE FUTURE OF CARE

Issue 06

THE PROTEIN SHAKE-UP The world is going hungry, and the solution could be insects and mealworms. We speak to the company building the planet’s largest and most high-tech insect farm to find out what the future of protein looks like

DANIEL BRIGHAM Content Director

I

come from a very niche generation, born between 1981-84: old enough to go through my entire school years with no access to the internet or a mobile phone, but still young(ish) enough to have been suddenly fully online and obsessed with Snake on the Nokia 3210 throughout university.

I still remember the first-ever email I sent, when I was 17. It was to a friend travelling in Australia because, well, it seemed a momentous thing to be able to immediately transport a message across the globe. The internet, mobile phones, and email: it felt genuinely earth-shattering at the time to have gone from writing letters and using landlines to, well, opening up everything.

Now, for perhaps the first time in history, teenagers are ahead of adults when it comes to technological familiarity and usage. It’s why an ever-increasing number of inventions and breakthroughs are coming from people who are still in their teenage years, and it’s also why big tech firms are pouring significant amounts of money

into mentoring programmes in order to scoop up the brightest young technological minds.

We celebrate this culture shift across our sixth issue of Tech For Good. We launch a new interview series, Teenage Tech Stories, which focuses on talking to teen entrepreneurs about their significant achievements in the world of tech. We kick it off with a chat with 15-year-old Nishka Mathur, who has received the Prime Minister’s Point of Light Award for delivering coding workshops to over 1,000 young people in the UK and India.

Elsewhere we cover the Tech4Good Awards, organised by AbilityNet, which this year had a focus on youth. The winners include teenagers supporting people with dyslexia, a mental health app to combat suicide, and digital lessons for refugees. We also speak to Jessie Soohyun Park, Head of CSR at Samsung Electronics UK, about how its education programmes are helping thousands of youngsters.

I hope you enjoy the issue!

PUBLISHED BY BULLETIN MEDIA LTD, Norwich, UK Company No: 11454926 TALK TO US editorial@digitalbulletin.com business@digitalbulletin.com

CONTENTS 06

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How insects could be the solution to world hunger

From Moon landings to lab-grown meat, we round up the news

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Kids special: The stories behind the Tech4Good Awards winners

The community-led platform helping people to give up alcohol

ENVIRONMENT

EDUCATION

GLOBAL NEWS

SOCIAL GOOD

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Kids special: We chat to 15-year-old Nishka Mathur

Jeff Kirschner, founder and CEO of open litter platform, Litterati

TEEN TECH STORIES

EXPERT INSIGHT

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Kids special: Samsung’s CSR drive to educate youngsters

Investigating remote monitoring and the future of care

LEADERSHIP

HEALTHCARE

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PUBLIC SECTOR

Behind the scenes of the NHS’s connectivity revolution

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ENVIRONMENT

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TECH FOR GOOD

FEEDING THE WORLD MEALWORMS

FEEDING THE WORLD MEALWORMS What if the solution to world hunger were worms? Tech for Good speaks to Jean-Gabriel Levon, Impact Director at Ÿnsect, about the company’s project to build the planet’s largest and most high-tech insect farm in order to meet the world’s protein demands AUTHOR: Beatriz Valero de Urquía

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he world is desperately hungry.

In the last two years, the global number of undernourished people grew from 811 to 820 million, according to Action Against Hunger. In 2020, this number is expected to rise by 135 million due to the impact of COVID-19.

The World Resources Institute projects that, by 2050, there will be a 70% human food calorie gap, a demand the agriculture industry is unable to meet.

In 2050, the world’s population is predicted to rise to 9.6 billion people. The regions where most of this growth is set to happen, sub-Saharan Africa, China and India, are also the largest importers of food. The United Nations (UN) has predicted that, if nothing changes, in 10 years’ time almost 10% of the global population will be hungry.

The food crisis is a production problem, not a distribution one. The agriculture sector simply can’t increase its production at a parallel rate to the continuous growth of the global population. According to the World Resources Institute, even if we took all the food produced in 2020 and distributed it evenly amongst the global population, the world will still need to produce 974 more calories per person per day by 2050 to close the calorie gap. The world is in need of a new, affordable and sustainable way of feeding itself.

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We want to create a reliable, robust and simple way to feed humanity” Jean-Gabriel Levon

FEEDING THE WORLD MEALWORMS

Ÿnsect believes it has found the solution: indoor insect farming.

“Our mission is to feed the world,” says Jean-Gabriel Levon, Impact Director at Ÿnsect. “We want to create a reliable, robust and simple way to feed humanity.

We want to take care of the whole food chain, from the soil that we cultivate in up to the nutrition we have.”

The key to unlocking this source of nutrients is Tenebrio Molitor, also known as the mealworm beetle. The Molitor beetles can provide a low-cost, high-quality source of protein, which can feed livestock, fish stock, and even humans, while also serving as a nutritious fertiliser for most soils. Ÿnsect believes that using its product to feed fish stock

would release enough proteins to feed two billion more people in 2050 - the exact predicted increase in the world’s population in that time - while also reducing agriculture’s 25% share of global greenhouse gas emissions. However, Ÿnsect does not want to stop here. The company believes in a future where its product will be included in the human diet, therefore unlocking a new and sustainable source of protein that will solve the food crisis.

All it takes is eating insects.

“I really think that as soon as the product we make tastes good and is affordable it will reach the market,” Levon says. “I’m not expecting everyone to like insects in the same way that not everyone likes ISSUE 06

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snails or oysters - but there’s more than enough people that will be happy to try a food that tastes good and that is sustainable. It’s not a regulation issue. After all, we already eat insect vomit: honey.”

In fact, Levon is so confident in the benefits of mealworms that he even served them at his wedding banquet.

“It tastes like something you’ve eaten before,” he says.

But Ÿnsect is not alone in its mission to solve the hunger crisis. “I’m very

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happy because the Chief Scientist, the Avenger, is an investor in our company,” Levon says. The company has recently raised $372 million in Series C funding from investors including Footprint Coalition, a compancy which was launched last year by, you guessed it, Robert Downey Jr., the actor who plays Ironman. Footprint Coalition’s goal is to support projects that use technology to tackle the impact of climate change, and Ÿnsect is planning on using

FEEDING THE WORLD MEALWORMS

We wouldn’t be able to run a zerofootprint beetle factory like ours without the digitalisation and the data analytics that we are able to use thanks to the development of information technology” these funds to build the world’s largest high-technology insect farm, located in Amiens, France.

The Amiens factory, set to open in early 2022, will produce 100,000 tons of insect products including flour and oil, annually, and create 500 jobs. The plant will spread over 40,000 square metres and be 40 metres tall; “the highest vertical farm in the world”. It will also be the first carbon-negative one.

The technology used in this plant to raise beetles isn’t new; it consists of a combination of infrastructure including Amazon Warehouse and greenhouse technology. However, the true innovation is in its digitalisation and automation.

“We need to be able to monitor each Molitor worm separately,” Levon says.

“We wouldn’t be able to run a zero-footprint beetle factory like ours without the digitalisation and the data analytics that we are able to use thanks to the development of information technology.”

Ÿnsect has already deployed this technology in its other farms, such as the one built in Dole, France, in 2016. These plants use a ‘vertical farm’ structure, called Farm-hill, inspired by the tunnel networks that ants make to store food and provide airflow. This technology allows Ÿnsect to monitor the plant’s temperature and humidity, as well as each mealworm’s state, to identify the point when they reach the mealworm mature

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stage. The machines then steam, sterilise and process these mealworms, while the sorting and packaging processes are also fully automated.

Although Ÿnsect’s products are safe for human and pet consumption, the company is currently focused on commercialising its insect-based fertiliser and fish-stock food. In fact, Ÿnsect was the first company to obtain market approval from the French Agency for Food, Environment and Occupational Health 12

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& Safety (ANSES) for its insect-based fertiliser, ŸnFrass.

“For the agriculture industry, the big thing to follow today is ‘How do we stop growing plants and start growing soil?’”

Levon says. “A lot of our practices in the last century have focused on growing plants instead of taking care of the soil. I think this is the main change in our industry at the moment: the way the industry thinks about the soil.”

The UN’s Food and Culture Organisa-

FEEDING THE WORLD MEALWORMS

tion has in fact warned of the dangers that accompany the degradation of soil, particularly caused by erosion, nutrient imbalance, biodiversity losses and contamination. Soil degradation directly impacts food production, and therefore, world hunger.

Some of the first customers of ŸnFrass are wine-maker Torres, and Compo Group, one of the European leaders in plant nutrition for gardeners. The latter has also partnered with Ÿnsect to commercialise one of its products, which will reach markets in spring 2021. “It’s quite exciting for us because it will be the first time that we have a B2C product that contains insects,” Levon says, pointing out that the company’s activities are generally B2B. Ÿnsect’s other product, ŸnMeal, has also been getting a lot of commercial attention as a sustainable and affordable substitute product that can meet the needs of industrial fish farming. This

industry has already suffered fourfold fish-stock price increase over the last 15 years, and its supply is predicted to drop 3 million tons by 2025. The fact that industrial fish farming already provides over 50% of the fish humans eat, only aggravates this crisis. Ÿnsect’s solution, ŸnMeal, is a protein-rich ingredient made from Ÿnsect’s mealworms and produced in powder form. Moreover, since insects are already present in the diet of many wild fish and crustaceans, they do not disrupt the natural food chain.

“One of the main ingredients of fish food comes from fish,” Levon says. “So the problem with the industry is that the sustainability criteria are not met. We have a huge gap in terms of provision of high-quality protein that needs to be solved. So that’s why all our clients are extremely interested in this beetle protein.”

And this interest has definitely materialised, as Ÿnsect has been able to secure $70m in ŸnMeal orders for the next

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Ÿnsect insect farm in Amiens, which is due to open in 2022 four years. This number is even more impressive when one is aware of the criteria that Ÿnsect uses to choose clients and providers.

“The biggest challenge is not what’s happening inside your own company, it’s what’s happening outside,” Levon says. “Around 80% of a company’s carbon footprint is created outside of it; it’s about the relationships you have with your suppliers and with your clients. It’s very easy not to buy something from someone who is not performing enough 14

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on sustainability. It’s harder to say to a client: ‘No, because you’re not using our product in the right way’. But those are things that we have started doing.”

To support these sustainability efforts, Ÿnsect has made sure that all its accounting is translated into the equivalent tons of CO2 emitted, and monitors these numbers “with the same speed and detail” as the company’s cash. But, despite the fact that Ÿnsect is currently “fully-funded”; Levon states that the only reason the company would attempt to raise addition-

FEEDING THE WORLD MEALWORMS

I really think that the vertical farm technology that we have could be used in space programmes to better feed the population”

al funds would be to drive their sustainability goals. Well, and to reach the Moon.

“Space-development is really something that could be of interest to us, especially now since Ironman is on the board,” Levon says. Although the Ironman part might be a joke, the possibility of using vertical farming and insect-derived nutrients to feed insects to humans in space is not.

“I really think that the vertical farm technology that we have could be used in space programmes to better feed

the population. So why not? We need to take care of the planet and we don’t have the luxury to discard any solution.”

Until humans can live on Mars or the Moon, or cultivate food in space, they need to ensure their survival on Earth. In Levon’s view, the fight against climate change and world hunger has to be an “industry-wide effort, a society-wide effort”. Every little gesture, even including insects in people’s or pet’s diets, makes a great impact. Plus, who wouldn’t be curious to try them?

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TECH4GOOD AWARDS

Empowering children to change the world Three teenagers supporting people with dyslexia, a group of Rohingya children receiving digital lessons, or a mental health app to combat suicide: the Tech4Good Awards organised by AbilityNet showcased worldwide projects pushing children to reach their full potential. We speak to some of the inspiring winners

AUTHOR: Beatriz Valero de Urquía

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oday’s youth was born in a digital age. According to the Global Web Index, 98% of children between the ages of eight and 18 own a smartphone. They are the first generation to receive education through remote learning and can’t imagine a world without the internet.

But what happens when you’re born to a world you can’t access?

Physical and learning disabilities, language barriers and socioeconomic status are only some of the barriers that

young people encounter when trying to access the internet. However, when most schooling and employment is done online, accessibility becomes a right, rather than a request.

More and more, people and organisations are coming together to bridge that gap and turn technology from a privileged space to a tool to help those that are most in need. Every day, new projects are born that aim to use technology to improve children’s access to education and healthcare. And that is exactly the ISSUE 06

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Winning awards is a reminder that an idea that we’ve had can actually be made into something�

Justine

type of projects that AbilityNet celebrates in its annual Tech4Good Awards.

AbilityNet is a UK charity that helps disabled people use technology at home, at work and in education. It has collaborated with companies such as Barclays, helping it make its work environment and services more accessible, for example, by improving its app and allowing customers to get cash delivered to their homes.

However, the ability to make a change is not reserved for huge companies.

Everyone can contribute to making the digital world more accessible. That was

Sonia, Justine, and Dorothy from Dimming Dyslexia and their teacher Mrs Roy

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TECH4GOOD AWARDS

the reason why Mark Walker, Head of Marketing at AbilityNet, set out to create the Tech4Good Awards, the first of its kind, with the support of BT and other sponsors.

“We came up with the idea almost 12 years ago now,” Walker recalls. “And in one of our first meetings, a person at BT said: ‘I think there already is one’. And then she looked up and said: ‘No, there isn’t.

Okay, we’ll help you make it happen’. And that’s what they’ve done since then.

“The aim remains the same: to shine a light on people who are doing good things. We want to celebrate, to learn, and to support those people to do more.”

Although this year the awards ceremony did not take place at its usual venue at BT Tower, and the winners were announced over Zoom, the quality of their projects has not been affected

by the pandemic. In fact, many of the projects recognised in 2020 addressed a very important topic for the COVID-19 world: how to use technology to help disadvantaged children.

The most common cause of reading, writing and spelling difficulties in children is dyslexia, which affects an estimated 700 million people worldwide, according to Dyslexia. After seeing their classmate struggle to read their class notes and textbooks, three 14-year-olds from Sacred Heart High School in London decided to do something about it.

Dorothy, Sonia and Justine are the winners of the 2020 BT Young Pioneers Award, which celebrates young people using technology to make an impact in society. The three friends have created Dimming Dyslexia, an app that analyses text and resources and translates them ISSUE 06

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into a format that is easier for dyslexic students to understand, such as cartoons, videos or specific fonts.

“We want to help people by making educational things more comprehensive and easier to understand,” says Justine.

“But it’s not just people in secondary school,” adds Dorothy. “We have spoken to lots of people who have said that it would be a really useful thing for them to have in their everyday life, and they really wished they had it when they were younger.”

Their teacher Rotna Roy expresses how “impressed and proud” she is of the girls and their passion for STEM. “If it wasn’t for competitions like the BT Young Pioneer Award organised by Tech4Good the girls would not be able to demonstrate their resilience, determination, growth mindset and enthusiasm and I don’t think this project would be as successful as it is now!” she says.

“Now we’re working with BT to help us advertise and develop the app,” Sonia explains. As part of the award, they have received £10,000 to fund the project as well as access BT experts who will help the young girls develop and scale the app across the country.

Nonetheless, what the girls also take from the awards is the motivation to keep innovating.

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“I think winning awards is a reminder that an idea that we’ve had can actually be made into something,” says Justine.

“STEM right now is a very male-dominated field, so these types of competitions encourage you to do things that perhaps you may have not found interest in at first.”

The Dimming Dyslexia team is proof that no matter your age, anyone can make a difference. Walker explains that this was the goal of the award. “The more that you can get people to hear them talk, I think the more that you

TECH4GOOD AWARDS

realise that there are a lot of people doing really interesting things. It encourages you to find out what’s going on in your local community.”

Your local area might be London, or it could be a little further away; like a Rohingya refugee camp in Bangladesh.

After decades of persecution and displacement from Myanmar, a series of ethnic cleansing attacks in 2017 forced over 750,000 Rohingya people to seek refuge in Bangladesh, in what became the fastest-growing refugee crisis in the world.

Now, the half a million Rohingya children

that live in the Bangladeshi refugee camps lack access to education and childfriendly facilities and face the prospects of child marriage, trafficking and labour.

Children on the Edge, the charity created by Dame Anita Roddick, founder of The Body Shop, has set up a digital learning program to provide access to education to 7,500 Rohingya refugee students and 1,400 slumdwelling children in the Kutupalong camp, Cox’s Bazar slum communities and Doharazi enclaves in Bangladesh.

Its program was the winner of the TechISSUE 06

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4Good Education Award, sponsored

by Lenovo.

John Littleton, the Asia Regional Manager for Children on the Edge, has seen the project grow from its inception to what it is today. He has worked with the Rohingya refugees since 2009, back when teaching them was banned and schools had to be disguised as homes.

He recalls how the 2017 genocide “changed everything”.

“After the genocide took place, a million people crossed the border,” he says. “The whole international community paid attention to it, and we got formal approval to work there. But, 22

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after the dust settled, the Bangladeshi government realised that these people weren’t going anywhere, but it didn’t want them to stay in the country, so it limited them in terms of education.”

To avoid assimilation, the Bangladeshi government stipulated that the Rohingya refugees could only learn in Burmese or English, two languages that neither the refugee children nor their teachers could understand. Children on the Edge was the first organisation on the terrain that decided to take action to address this problem by creating video lessons in the Rohingya local language, that teachers can play at the beginning of each lesson.

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“We eventually found LG battery-powered projectors that would last long enough to do both the morning and afternoon sessions,” Littleton says. “And when the internet was cut off in the camp, we got broadband so that the teachers could come and download the lessons in our office and charge the projectors after the school day was over.”

Although digital lessons don’t require high technology, Littleton explains that this project would not have been possible five years ago. “The bandwidth wasn’t there,” he says. “High-speed internet wasn’t available. The batteries on the projectors would last half an hour and that was it. There were so many barriers that we had to work through, and it was only over the last 18 months or so that we finally saw that this was a real possibility.”

However, the best part of the programme is that it gives the children a voice. To tackle isolation and allow the children to express themselves, Children on the Edge has created Moja Kids, a platform where the children film their own videos and share their day-to-day lives with children in other camps or community schools.

“These children are confined in a refugee camp,” Littleton says. “They can’t leave.

So for them to see kids who speak the same language as them who are from the host community, just up the road, but

These children are confined in a refugee camp. They can’t leave.

So for them to see kids who speak the same language as them who are from the host community, just up the road, but have challenges to have to work as well, have dreams and ideas as well; it was a transformative moment” John Littleton

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Rohingya refugee camp, Bangladesh have challenges to have to work as well, have dreams and ideas as well; it was a transformative moment.”

Littleton stresses that the project isn’t a “promotional” or “fundraising” tool, but a way for the children to share stories and gain inspiration and hope from meeting other kids just like them, but that live a few miles, or even continents away. .“We’ve recently brought on board our first international partner in Cambodia, and they made a video about plastic pollution in their slum communities. And guess what? There’s a huge problem with plastic pollution in the Bangladeshi 24

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slums as well. And so they shared some of the things they were doing with their recycled plastic, which was really encouraging and interesting for the kids.”

Refugee children from Congo in Uganda and Dalit children in Northern India, all gain hope from knowing they’re not alone. Littleton explains that his team has six countries lined up to get involved with Moja Kids, connecting together the different locations in which Children on the Edge operates.

After all, struggle knows no borders.

The Moja Kids platform might be low-tech, but it is a hands-on, direct and

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scalable solution that meets the needs of so many children in these refugee communities all across the world. “It’s so successful because it started with the people first, rather than the technology,” Walker says.

The focus on people rather than technology is also very present in MeeTwo, the 2019 winners of the Connected Society Award, sponsored by Samsung.

Although one in eight teenagers has a mental health problem, 76% of them never receive any treatment, making suicide the leading cause of death for young people in the United Kingdom.

MeeTwo wants to break the mental health stigma in children through a peer-support mental health app.

“It’s clear that if we could help young people to have healthier minds, it would provide them with the resilience and the tools that they need to then become healthy adults,” says Kerstyn Comley, MeeTwo Co-Founder and Co-CEO. The MeeTwo app is anonymous and fully moderated, so every post gets checked before going live. This allows the moderators to identify potential issues that might be too complex for peer community support, which are then addressed by in-house counsellors. The app already has over 40,000 users, 35% of whom are male.

“That’s particularly important because boys are so hard to reach,” Comley says. “We all in some way are prejudiced. And the fact that the app is anonymous levels the playing field for anybody to be able to post anything.”

The company has also launched MeeTwo Connect, a service in which organisations and schools can include a specific portal in the app to make their mental health services more accessible to young people. Moreover, through MeeTwo Connect, NHS Trusts and schools can gain access to anonymised data on the main issues that young people struggle with.

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It’s clear that if we could help young people to have healthier minds, it would provide them with the resilience and the tools that they need to then become healthy adults” Kerstin Comley

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“During the lockdown, we saw a significant increase in usage,” Comley says. “But also, in the first few days of lockdown, we saw a lot more posting where people were clearly panicked, anxious and worried. Since then, there has been a steady decrease in anxiety.”

MeeTwo is currently undergoing several trials in the Chelsea and Westminster Hospital NHS Foundation Trust, the Anna Freud Centre and several schools in the Yeovil area in south-west England, overseen by Somerset Clinical Commissioning Group. The goal is to show the success of preventive mental health care and its relation to social media.

“I think it’s really interesting that it’s possibly the first time in human existence, where young are being exposed and learning something brand-new at exactly the same time as the adults,” she says. “Normally if you look back through all the new developments and inventions in history, adults have the opportunity to get to grips with it first and pass that knowledge down to the young people. With social media, it’s the other way around.”

Education is now more than ever reliant on technology and only by ensuring that the children of tomorrow have access to the resources they need to thrive, will they be able to become successful adults and overcome the

TECH4GOOD AWARDS

many challenges that life will put in their way. Competitions like the Tech4Good Awards showcase projects that have this goal in mind and celebrate society’s commitment to making technology an enabler, not a barrier, to success.

“I think we represent a specific way of

using tech,” Walker says. “It’s not about the actual tech itself. Mostly what we are impressed by is the way that people are using that tech to do good. And anybody can do that. Anybody can just shift a little bit the way they think about things to make a change.”

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TEENAGE TECH STORIES

Teenage tech stories Each month, Tech for Good speaks to one teenage entrepreneur about their incredible achievements in the world of tech, and how they’re contributing to making the world a better place

Name: Nishka Mathur

Age: 15 Born: London, UK Achievements: Nishka has recently received the Prime Minister’s Points of Light Award for her work delivering 40 coding workshops for over 1,000 young people, especially girls, in disadvantaged areas of India and the UK

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NISHKA MATHUR

I

was first introduced to coding when I was around six or seven, seeing Scratch for the first time over my older sister’s shoulder when she was trying it out. I instantly loved it because of the way it combines creativity and logic - every programme is designed to solve a problem and usually, the solution isn’t obvious or easy.

Around three or four years ago, I went to one of my first events for young coders. It was a two-day event where the 12 participants learned to design a workshop on the first day and deliver it to members of the public the second. I really loved running the workshop because I felt that I was helping inspire people to think in different ways and it was great to see the enthusiasm on the faces of people who’d never tried programming before.

Sandhya Puchalapalli is hugely inspirational for me - she runs a charity for abandoned girls in rural India, called Aarti Home, which shelters and educates girls.

When I first started, I was under the common misconception that programming is quite anti-social. Meeting young people who also love to code made me even more enthusiastic about it. Recently, I collaborated with a group to develop an app to help hearing-impaired people.

I was extremely nervous while running workshops. At first, I didn’t feel qualified to teach, being a young teenager who had not even completed a GCSE in Computer Science. Now I feel that my age, as well as my gender, gives me an advantage in being able to teach young people, as I feel much more relatable to them, especially in disadvantaged areas where girls have been discouraged from pursuing STEM.

I love how flexible and accessible coding is - all it needs is a computer to get started, and anyone can do it.

In the UK, I mainly run workshops in London and other cities, while in India I run them in disadvantaged areas, which ISSUE 06

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means their computer literacy levels are very different. In India, in the villages, I often have to start from the basics to ensure that the students are comfortable.

When I teach, they see a girl who can code and has a passion for STEM and they realise that they can do it too, which is a huge first step to take.

I believe that being able to deliver workshops to young people who have not had access to the same opportunities that I have had helps me to give back to society.

I have also faced challenges such as poor Wi-Fi or no power. In one of the first workshops I taught in India with around 100 participants, there was a power failure. Instead of demonstrating code, as I had intended, I decided to teach more about computational thinking and used volunteers to enact the way a computer thinks versus how a human thinks.

Tech4Good Awards provided a platform for me to crowdfund money to extend my work and help provide more young people with the resources to start learning programming.

I raised over ÂŁ3000, which was really exciting. I decided to use the money I had raised to help young people learn coding despite coronavirus, by providing them with computers and tutorials.

The lending-library-style ensures that more students have the opportunity to use the kits. Each of the 10 kits will be given to a school in rural India, where the teachers will moderate the loaning of these kits for a few weeks or months to the students, who do not otherwise have access to a computer.

I was very surprised and gratified to receive the Prime Minister’s Point of Light Award, as I had not applied for it myself, and it has inspired me to carry on my work further.

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NISHKA MATHUR

I believe that because I am a young girl, I am in a unique position to reach out to other young girls who often face sexism or exclusion due to age on a day-to-day basis, as well as able to educate young boys who have grown up with these prejudices.

I would like to speak to the leaders of different nations and tell them to invest more money and resources into education, especially education for women and increase outreach to rural or disadvantaged areas where prejudice can be

extremely harmful, such as abandoning girls at birth and help create more opportunities for women.

I think that I would like to study Engineering or Computer Science. I also see my work in helping inspire young people to get interested in STEM and coding as a central part of my life, reaching out directly or indirectly to many more young people.

I would want other young girls to know that they shouldn’t be scared to speak up, however daunting it may seem.

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LEADING POSITIVE CHANGE

Tech firms have a huge responsibility to ensure their solutions will improve society. Jessie Soohyun Park, Head of CSR at Samsung Electronics UK, talks to Tech For Good about how the company’s education-focused CSR programmes are opening doors for thousands of young people

W

AUTHOR: Ben Mouncer

ith great power comes great responsibility. It’s one of the oldest phrases in the book and it’s more relevant than ever to the world’s biggest technology companies.

As we become increasingly reliant on technology, the architects of the digital revolution grow more and more powerful. This is a trend of huge political, economic and societal significance.

Are tech businesses our enablers, or our enemies? Either way, the scale of their influence is irrefutable.

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Some are probably more awake to their responsibilities than others.

In the case of Samsung, turning its power into a positive for society has always been a driving motivation.

According to this year’s Fortune Global 500, Samsung Electronics, Samsung’s core business unit, is the world’s 19th biggest company by revenue. A global leader in consumer electronics and telecommunications, Samsung Electronics estimates that its corporate social responsibility (CSR) efforts have

LEADING POSITIVE CHANGE

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We have a global vision around how we enable people. It’s all about ensuring that everyone, but particularly the next generation, can feel like they can benefit from technology and use it to create a better future” Jessie Soohyun Park

positively impacted 20 million people globally since 2012.

“We take it extremely seriously, and it’s grown naturally because of the way the company has also evolved, as a leading tech brand,” says Jessie Soohyun Park, Head of CSR at Samsung Electronics UK. CSR can cover a broad range of areas, from sustainability and environmental impact to community and educational support, and allows organisations to be socially accountable to their customers and stake34

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LEADING POSITIVE CHANGE

holders. In February 2019, to mark its 50th birthday, Samsung Electronics announced it would be focusing its CSR efforts around education. In particular it wanted to show how technology can help provide a better quality education for young people, whatever their circumstances.

This has been Soohyun Park’s professional mission in recent times. As she explains to Tech For Good, Samsung is committed to giving everyone equal access to the knowledge, skills, and resources needed to shape a better

future for themselves and their societies through technology.

“We have a global vision around how we enable people,” she says. “It’s all about ensuring that everyone, but particularly the next generation, can feel like they can benefit from technology and use it to create a better future.

We owe it to young people to feel like they’ve got the freedom and the right to shape that. It’s about making sure everyone has a futureproof education, so regardless of who they are or where they’re from, it’s ensuring we are able to ISSUE 06

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I can’t stress it enough but I really do believe education is going to be massively transformed by the changes in technology” provide quality and accessible education experiences.”

Samsung’s technology is intertwined with our lives. According to Statista, since 2012 the company has held a 20-30% share of the global smartphone market.

It is also at the centre of the burgeoning world of the Internet of Things (IoT), with more and more of its consumer electronics devices coming IoT-enabled.

When it comes to the tech itself, Samsung has always taken its responsibility to young people seriously. Its “Kids Home” safe mode, which can be switched on in a similar way to flight mode and protects young users from accessing potential harmful content, is now installed on every single Samsung device. But the organisation’s CSR efforts around technology and education represent a new level of ambition.

With rapid technological change on the horizon, Samsung wants to unleash the power of people. It has for a long time 36

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run educational programmes around the world, dating back to the creation of the Samsung Welfare Foundation in the 1990s. This, however, represents its biggest corporate citizenship shift towards domestic and overseas youth education. It wants to lead the way in demonstrating that technology companies have a duty of support.

“The change that tech will bring to society goes without saying, whether it’s the way that we are at home or at work, and how we communicate and access crucial services like education and health,” says Soohyun Park. “Technology companies have a responsibility to ensure that we’re shaping it into a more inclusive and fair experience.

“That could be anything from people living with disabilities feeling that the world they live in is much more accessible, or children who aren’t able to access formal education feel like they’ve got opportunities to access

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exciting learning experiences, regardless of where they are. I can’t stress it enough but I really do believe education is going to be massively transformed by the changes in technology.”

Soohyun Park has overseen a host of CSR initiatives in the UK. Samsung views the country as a key hub in Europe, and the CSR team benefits from the company’s European headquarters being on the outskirts of London and its network of local research and development hubs. In UK CSR, Samsung Electronics’ work touched 73,000 people in 2019/20, and more than 1,600 hours were volunteered by staff on CSR programmes.

“Through our programmes we are trying to instil a purpose-led innovation approach because ultimately you want young people to come into the world feeling like they’re using the tech to their benefit, but also feeling like they’re empowered to make the change that they want, particularly around the issues they care mostly about,” says Soohyun Park.

The Not a School programme is one such example. Pitched as an “alternative” educational experience, Not a School explores some of the most important social issues and how technology can help solve them. This year’s programme was built around four perti-

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nent themes: increasing diversity and inclusion online, turning climate anxiety into positive action, combating social isolation in the digital world, and solving inequality in education.

Not a School is offered as either an immersive two-week programme for 18-25-year-olds, or as a series of selfled, online learning courses that are accessible to all. It marries theory with practice, as alumni design their own solutions using technology. At the time of our interview, Soohyun Park said 14,000 people had signed up to the public version over a period of just eight weeks.

“That’s what we were aiming for over the course of 12 months, so obviously we’re 38

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really delighted that lots of people are interested in the issues,” she says. “It is a bit of an unorthodox programme, and it’s unorthodox for a tech brand to be doing this as well. But we wanted to take a step back and for once maybe not talk about tech from the beginning. It all started out from what young people care about - and when you hit their interest and passions, that’s when they really want to learn.”

Not a School feeds into Samsung’s Solve For Tomorrow competition, a global contest which offers entrants a potential share of $100k+ of Samsung technology and the chance to enrol on an incubation programme. This involves workshops and mentorship on advanced technologies

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like artificial intelligence, and general business skills such as project management and setting up your own company.

Solve For Tomorrow launched for the first time in the UK in December.

Across its initiatives, Soohyun Park reveals feedback has been very positive.

Samsung ultimately wants to offer a pathway for young entrepreneurs to build technological solutions to problems they care about, regardless of their background. She says he has been touched by some of the reactions, especially around the Not A School programme.

“Quite a lot of them walked into the programme feeling quite down, and also not knowing what to expect. But the

feedback has been great. Someone said ‘I don’t feel small anymore’, others said they have a clear picture of what they want to do next. From an educational perspective, you really can’t ask for more than that.”

Soohyun Park admits the company has had to adapt fast to the shifting learning environment brought about by COVID-19.

She is encouraged by the collaboration that is more prevalent in industry generally in the wake of the pandemic, and says the move to online has forced her teams to think of new models of delivery.

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Quite a lot of them walked into the [Not a School] programme feeling quite down, and also not knowing what to expect. But the feedback has been great.

Someone said ‘I don’t feel small anymore’, others said they have a clear picture of what they want to do next. From an educational perspective, you really can’t ask for more than that”

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the importance of creating access and trying to make sure that whoever we’re trying to reach, the opportunity feels like it’s grabbable.

“With online learning, it’s really interesting to see what the formula is going to be in terms of getting across the type of content and kind of information that you need, but also in the way that people digest it. It’s been interesting for us to see, build-in breaks and look at optimum lengths of learning to keep people engaged. And it’s also about thinking of people’s wider wellbeing needs alongside the learning experience. That’s what you need to consider and build in when you’re trying to deliver something online.”

Overall, Soohyun Park is hugely encouraged by the potential of people and technology to combine in the future. She quotes a mid-pandemic survey that showed how the target market of Samsung’s CSR initiatives largely feels the same.

“We ran a research of our own with young people a couple of months ago, called the Compassion Nation, and what was really surprising and really lovely to read about was that they feel more compassionate than ever. They are also really positive about the potential of technology to solve some of the issues that they really care about.”

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FASTER, CHEAPER, BETTER The National Health Service has migrated from its legacy N3 network to the HSCN. It has promised faster connectivity that allows for greater innovation and data sharing at a reduced cost.

We spoke to Patrick Clark, the man behind the transformation AUTHOR: Daniel Brigham

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n October this year, the United Kingdom’s National Health Service (NHS) was coming under severe strain. The second wave of COVID-19 had gripped Britain, and hospitals were starting to see an influx of patients severely ill from Coronavirus in a volume that hadn’t been seen since the end of Spring.

Yet, against this grim backdrop, there was a victory at the NHS. A reason to celebrate.

October marked the completion of a long but important journey, one that had officially started three years earlier in October 2017. The NHS had finished its transition from the legacy N3 network to its Health and Social Care Network (HSCN). The move covered over 12,000

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premises belonging to 950 health and care organisations.

The aims were simple, but onerous: faster connectivity, improved security, and reduced cost.

When the N3 contract was coming to an end in 2007, NHS Digital saw it as an opportunity to reevaluate its data network. N3 was a private network with a single supplier – British Telecom (BT) – that was paid for and contracted centrally to provide NHS organisations with access to a set of national applications. But the landscape had changed as the contract expired. The sector had seen an exponential growth in bandwidth consumption and digital 44

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services, while there was a culture shift to ensure health and social care organisations could collaborate more effectively.

Patrick Clark, Director of Networks and Infrastructure, NHS Digital, was tasked with overseeing the mammoth project.

“We wanted to move away from a single supplier, centrally contracted, private network model,” he tells Tech For Good. “Instead we wanted to create a competitive marketplace of suppliers capable of providing health and care organisations with hybrid connectivity services that would comply with a common set of standards and interoperate with one another.

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“In doing so we wanted to give health and care organisations choice, better value for money and the ability to regularly test a market of suppliers in order to continually obtain the best services at the best price.”

The process to realising these goals was lengthy, but the process was clear.

The supplier community – which had been locked out of the health and care market during the N3 contract – was brought on board. A compliance regime was established to enable suppliers to demonstrate they could deliver connectivity services to the defined standard.

This created a marketplace of 21 suppliers that were ready to compete to provide value. The responsibility of buying and operating networks was devolved to local organisations, with centralised help to procure new HSCN services. To migrate over 12,000 sites to the new HSCN connectivity, NHS Digital worked with BT, suppliers and customers.

Three short years later, the transition was complete.

Clark is proud of the sheer scale of the transition, with over 178 separate procurements for HSCN connectivity services completed: “That’s a big deal!” he says. “It wasn’t a simple software update, this involved network engineers

By revisiting their deals every threeto-five years, local NHS organisations can have an increased focus on their medium and longer-term technology needs” going to GP surgeries and hospitals to install cables - sometimes digging up roads - installing routers and then co-ordinating downtime at the health sites to enable the actual switch from N3 to HSCN. “The average number of migrations per month during 2020 was well over 400 and we actually did over 1000 in a single month. You’ll be hard pressed to find any network transition programme that’s done anything near that.

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far as major programmes go, and a credit to those involved and to our organisation.”

Clark says that HSCN services are on average 70% cheaper than the equivalent services under N3, while the NHS has estimated the change will save it £75m annually. It’s a big tick in the value-for-money box. The money being saved has allowed health and care organisations to upgrade their connectivity: Around 70% of premises have full fibre connectivity, up from 30% under N3, while less than 1% of premises are still using ADSL or copper connectivity now – down from 40% under N3.

This better connectivity has supported 46

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the NHS’s shift to more public cloudbased services.

Central services have been strengthened, with a new cloud-based Domain Name Service integrated to the National Cyber Security Centre’s Protective DNS. The health of HSCN is monitored by a Network Analytics Service, which identifies new or anomalous behavior.

This all sounds very impressive, but what does it mean in practice? “GPs have improved system performance by having speedier, increased bandwidth, supporting things like data transfers,” Clark says. “This enables GPs to spend less time waiting for system data to

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upload or download and therefore more time on patient care.

“For trusts, the affordable bandwidth supports numerous key pieces of work across multiple functions and collaborations between trusts, such as the picture archiving and communication system and other imaging transfers. Health and care organisations now have access to a peering exchange, enabling supplier-to-supplier HSCN peering connectivity.

This supports interoperability between local NHS organisations, regardless of the awarded service provider.”

Clark is evangelical about moving from one service provider to having the option

of choosing from 21. Increased competition, he says, has driven value for money, bringing fast bandwidth and connectivity within the budgets of health and care organisations. This, Clarke says, has led to better coverage and fibre-based broadband being affordable primary care services, such as GP surgeries.

“The marketplace offers more frequent procurement cycles, as well,” he says. “By revisiting their deals every three-to-five years, local NHS organisations can have an increased focus on their medium and longer-term technology needs.

“All of these ensure that consumer choice is placed at the heart of procurement, solution design and implementation.”

With over 12,000 sites migrated to HSCN, the success stories are numerous and varied.

Humberside NHS Foundation Trust, which employs 2,500 staff across 70 sites, has reported significant cost savings, as well as time and efficiency savings for clinicians. Sectra, which provides hospitals across the country with a portal for transferring medical images and reports, has seen a 50% increase in bandwidth – at lower cost – which means it can now meet the demand of processing six million images every day.

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We’ve delivered a Government Major Project Portfolio programme ahead of time, under budget and in a way that has delivered more benefit than initially envisaged” North East Ambulance Service (NEAS), which services over 2.71 million people, was one of the first ambulance services to migrate to HCSN. The migration allowed it to go from a 10mb and 6mb connection to a 100mb asynchronous connection at its sites, at no extra cost.

The improved connectivity means NEAS has equipped its paramedics with mobile devices that allows for video feeds and provides health data at the point of care.

Under N3, mental health provider Bradford District Care Foundation used paper-based ECG machines that were manually interpreted by doctors, with the results posted to an acute care 48

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provider. Now it uses an ECG On-Demand service that uses AI to assist in the analysis, which has cut down the waiting time for results from two weeks to two hours.

While these success stories have happened over a period of three years, at one point in March it seemed as if the migration might have to be delayed. The final touches to the transition were being carried out as COVID-19 changed the lives of billions across the planet, and millions in the UK – hundreds of thousands of whom needed the care of the NHS. The impact of COVID-19 initially slowed migration volumes, but from May onwards it increased significantly.

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So has the transition happened just in time?

“Yes, I think it has,” says Clark.

“The improved connectivity services provided through HSCN means organisations are much better able to cope with rapidly increasing online activity as a result of COVID-19 and gives them the underlying connectivity to continue to accelerate their digitisation of services.

“Without the connectivity provided

by HSCN the rapid deployment to video consultation would not have been possible, specifically across more rural GP sites that would have been connected to legacy ADSL connectivity under N3.”

While the three-year migration has

been completed, nothing ever really ends in digital transformation. HCSN has put in place the foundations for care and health providers to improve connectivity and data sharing, but there is still much work to be done – such as looking at emerging technologies to support health provision.

“We are already looking at the next generation of healthcare connectivity,” says Clark. “We are exploring how to support the delivery of gigabit-capable connectivity to health and social care across England over the coming years so the underlying infrastructure is in place to support the high speed connectivity services needed to help with the continued adoption of digital and cloud services.”

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GLOBAL GOOD

Gridserve opens the UK’s first all-electric car charging station The UK’s first electric-only car charging station has been opened by Gridserve. Built in Essex, the forecourt has space for 36 vehicles and can deliver 200 miles of range in 20 minutes of charging. Gridserve’s CEO has called it a “major milestone”. One hundred stations will be built across the UK by Gridserve over the next five years. Petrol and diesel cars will be banned in the country from 2030

Trump signs order to regulate US government AI use President Donald Trump has signed an executive order regulating federal agency use of artificial intelligence (AI). The order sets nine principles to guide the design, development, acquisition, and use of AI. The aim of this order is, according to the White House, “to foster public trust and confidence in the use of AI, and ensure that the use of AI protects privacy, civil rights, and liberties.”

GLOBAL GOOD In case you missed them, we’ve debriefed six of the most interesting Tech For Good stories from the last four weeks

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Huawei 5G equipment helps Brazilian soy farmers battle crop diseases Goias, a Brzilian soy farm state, has begun a pilot project that uses Huawei’s 5G technology to increase productivity and fight crop diseases. Huawei’s tech collects information from sensors placed in the fields and drones and analyses it alongside meteorological and humidity data. It offers information that would usually take days to collect, allowing farmers to take fast action

NEWS DEBRIEF

Arecibo Observatory telescope collapses The Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico has collapsed. It was one of the biggest telescopes in the world, and a key scientific resource for radio astronomers. Arecibo’s 900-ton equipment platform, which was suspended 500 feet above the dish, fell just weeks after officials announced that the telescope would dismantled amid safety fears. No injuries were reported

Chang’e-5 completes successful Moon landing

Startup Eat Just gets regulatory approval for world’s first “clean meat” San Francisco-based Eat Just has received regulatory approval from Singapore to sell lab-grown chicken meat. The muscle cells are grown in a 1,200-litre bioreactor, and is then combined with plant-based ingredients.

It has no antibiotics and lower microbiological content than conventional chicken. Scaled-up “clean meat” uses lower emissions and needs less water and land than conventional meat

The China National Space Administration has reported that its unmanned Chang’e-5 spacecraft has landed on the Moon. Its mission is to return elements of the lunar surface such as rocks and soil - only the third time this has ever been attempted. Change’-5 was launched on November 28 and is expected to return to Earth around December 17

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GETTING OUT OF THE HABIT

GETTING OUT OF THE HABIT Ruari Fairbairns, co-founder of One Year No Beer, tells Tech For Good about the community-led platform helping people to give up alcohol

AUTHOR: Daniel Brigham

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t’s the time for New Year’s resolutions. Giving up cigarettes. Taking up running. Definitely using your gym membership this time. January is a month for reevaluating things, for mapping out how you want the year ahead to go. But while there are plenty of apps for giving up smoking or starting up running, there isn’t much online support for one of the other staple resolutions: going alcohol-free.

One company trying to change that is One Year No Beer (OYNB).

Launched in 2015 in the UK, OYNB positions itself as a “habit-changing programme”, in which you take on 54

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alcohol-free challenges in a bid to give up, with support from the OYNB online community. Five years on from inception, it has over 70,000 members across 90 countries and recently closed its latest funding round with 125% of the target met. Its plan is to use the funding to further develop its technology infrastructure to support scaling up what it calls its “lifestyle support system”.

Co-founder Ruari Fairbairns turned his own personal experiences around drinking into OYNB. He grew up on the Isle of Mull in Scotland, which he describes as “synonymous with a drinking culture”. He was ambitious from a young

GETTING OUT OF THE HABIT

We have an opportunity here to connect people over the common goal of living a good life and helping people support each other through behaviour change” Ruari Fairbairns age, writing a letter to Richard Branson when he was 14: “I’m going to change the world one day. I’m looking forward to having lunch with you.” He may not have heard back from Branson, but that didn’t deter him. Fairbairns set up his first business at 15, and had tried five different enterprises by the age of 25.

Then everything changed when he applied to be on BBC’s The Apprentice, where contestants compete over a series of challenges to work for British businessman Lord Sugar. He didn’t get on, but at the audition he got chatting to an oil broker. Fast forward six months, and Fairbairns had become an oil broker working ISSUE 06

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in the City of London. The money was great, the lifestyle was good. But, slowly but surely, Fairbairns felt that something wasn’t quite right.

“A good eight or nine years into my career, I didn’t realise how much of a problem alcohol was causing,” he says.

“I was drinking socially a lot, but I didn’t really think I had a problem. Nobody told me I had a problem. I wasn’t carrying on drinking at the end of the night. I wasn’t going home and drinking.

I wasn’t pouring it on my cornflakes. So the problem wasn’t on my radar.”

However, in 2013 he started meditating on his train journeys, and that’s when it dawned on him that alcohol may be causing more issues than he’d realised.

“So I decided to take a break from booze and that is when all of life got

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better,” he says. “Fitter, healthier, happier, a better husband; a decade of niggling health issues disappeared. There is that perception in that sort of work culture of giving up drinking being the end of your life and the end of your career. But the reality was everything got better.”

Fairbairns took his personal experience and expanded it into wanting to help others in a similar situation: not targeted at people suffering from alcoholism, but at those who feel they’re drinking too much too regularly. Fairbairns and his business partner Andy Ramage settled on creating challenges to offer a sense of achievement and empowerment to people who, like them, wanted to change their lifestyles for the better.

The timing has coincided with a decrease in the amount of alcohol being

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consumed in the UK, a trend reflected in most western countries. In the UK, an average of 12.6 litres of pure alcohol was drunk per adult in 1990. In 2017, that had dropped to 11.4 litres – a fall of almost 10%. The study in The Lancet predicted it would drop to 11 litres a year by 2030.

The British culture has become more accepting of people who choose to not drink alcohol, and that’s reflected in the youth of the UK. A 2015 study by the Department of Epidemiology and Public Health at University College London

surveyed 10,000 16- to 24-year-olds in the UK, and found that the proportion who say they never drink alcohol had risen from 18% in 2005 to 29% in 2015.

Despite the shift in culture, alcohol consumption remains a deadly social issue, with campaigners warning that four out of five people with drinking problems in the UK aren’t getting the support or help they need.

OYNB offers a 28-day challenge, a 90-day challenge and a year-long challenge. All include email support, access to the OYNB community called the Connect Group, daily videos, e-books and guest coaching in fitness, diet and mindset.

“When we originally launched it, I was incredibly passionate about having a big impact on the world,” Fairbairns says.

“And I thought we could do that by giving it away for free. And so we gave it away for free, and it spread all over the world. It was on the front page of Yahoo in something like 10 different countries.

And we had 20,000 members in the first year, so what we’d successfully done is created an incredibly expensive hobby of getting people sober. Because free isn’t free, free is really expensive!”

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Everyone’s journey is different and everyone’s experiences are different.

So we’re going through that journey at the moment of saying, how can we offer content relevant to each person?”

look anybody in the eye who accused us of profiteering from people’s suffering and say, ‘you actually have it the wrong way round’. We have made sure that all of our pricing is below the cost of what you can spend on alcohol and still consider yourself to have a problem or an issue. So if you can afford alcohol, you can afford One Year No Beer.”

The technology behind the platform is described as “secret sauce” by Fairbairns, and it uses a variety of different apps such as Facebook and Slack. Its goal is to create a single platform for its users, which 58

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is currently being developed. It can then be scaled across different lifestyle choices (Fairbairns doesn’t like the word “addictions”), such as caffeine intake, sugar intake or gambling. He wants to move away from using Facebook as OYNB’s community platform due to the addictive problems associated with social media.

“Our intention is to do community better,” he says. “So we’ve just hired a mobile development team. We’ve got senior engineers now and have raised funding to start developing those products. We have an opportunity here

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to connect people over the common goal of living a good life and helping people support each other through behaviour change. That’s what I believe we’re up to.

“For example, the more positive, supportive and encouraging a community member is, the higher their visibility is. And what we’re trying to do is create a platform that allows people to create a lifestyle business. So if I’m a super user, I support a lot of people. I spend my time helping others change their relationship. So I should be rewarded for that, and we aim to do that.”

Although the community is global, Fairbairns wants to create localised communities to build partnerships, such as pubs and bars putting on alcohol-free nights for members to meet. He also wants the platform to reflect that its users have unique journeys: “At the moment our content is prescriptive,” he says. “But the reality is everyone’s journey is different and everyone’s experiences are different. So we’re going through that journey at the moment of saying, how can we offer content relevant to each person?”

Fairbairns says it’s looking to launch a Spanish-language version in the next 12 months as it has ambitions to go for Series A funding. He’s confident OYNB is ahead of the curve, and plans to keep it there as help for people with alcohol issues becomes increasingly digitalised. “I think it’ll explode in time,” he says. “So whether we’re the biggest, I don’t know. I don’t think we need to be the biggest but we are definitely the first.

“When you see some of these big behaviour-change apps, they’re usually around smoking or weight loss, and if you looked at their decks, you wouldn’t actually see alcohol featured on the radar. So I think that just gives us an opportunity. We definitely have firstmover advantage.”

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EXPERT INSIGHT: CLEANING THE PLANET Jeff Kirschner is founder and CEO of Litterati, the world’s largest open litter platform. Here he illustrates how individuals can use technology to fight against litter globally, and what the social good of their efforts might be

L

itter is an insidious problem. It is so pervasive we no longer notice it.

How many cigarettes, bottlecaps, candy wrappers, and gum wrappers do we walk over every day, everywhere, without even thinking about it? Plastic waste in particular kills animals and negatively impacts ecosystems as it is not naturally biodegradable – and it’s only getting worse. In fact, eight million tons of plastic enter the ocean every year. That’s one garbage truck every minute. According to the World Economic Forum, if no action is taken it will be two trucks every minute by 2030, and four every minute by 2050.

While many people pass by litter without a second thought, there are those

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JEFF KIRSCHNER

who understand why litter is an issue.

These citizens view picking up litter as their personal responsibility and civic duty. And, these are people of all ages and backgrounds. In fact, it was my fouryear-old daughter who helped me see litter’s universal detriment to our world.

Litter pick-up and organised clean-ups aren’t new. People have been picking up trash in their neighbourhoods on top of what municipalities perform for years.

But most people are overwhelmed by the pollution problem and plastic waste in our world. Many want to get involved, but just don’t know where to start.

This is why I founded the Litterati platform: to create a community of action-oriented individuals to help control litter, gather data, and witness results

against this major global problem. With the help of technology, we can monitor pick-up actions and use the information to make impactful changes in areas such as public policy, sustainable packaging, and recycling. Since its founding, the Litterati community has picked up nearly eight million pieces of litter across 165 countries, contributing to Litterati’s Open Litter Database – the largest of its kind.

The Litterati app— available in 12 languages — allows people to be part of the litter solution, with social good as its natural outcome. The user takes a snapshot of a piece of litter, tags it with identifiers such as #plastic or #bag, and uploads a photo before they discard the litter properly. The process captures the enthusiasm people have

Eight million tons of plastic enter the ocean every year.

That’s one garbage truck every minute”

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for environmentalism, sociability, and photo-snapping. Litterati identifies the litter in geo-tagged photos and collects the information.

Litterati believes in the three “Ps.” The data derived from litter pick-up can ultimately inform policy, influence packaging, and inspire personal responsibility.

This multi-faceted approach is what it will take to create a litter-free world. In fact, our database has become a powerhouse of information impacting decisions made by corporations and governments. For example, the Netherlands will begin paying a fee for deposit-return plastic bottles in 2021, a decision made with the help of Litterati’s findings.

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One of the most inspiring collaborations to rid the planet of litter was the recent ALL_TOGETHER GLOBAL CLEANUP, a three-week initiative in celebration of World Cleanup Day 2020, when Litterati partnered with the leading global nonprofit, the Alliance to End Plastic Waste (the Alliance). Our journey started with the Alliance when we won the Alliance-backed Plug and Play End Plastic Waste Innovation Platform in the United States earlier this year.

We partnered with the Alliance for the ALL_TOGETHER GLOBAL CLEANUP to continue to educate and change human behaviour when it comes to litter.

Members of the Alliance, individuals, and

JEFF KIRSCHNER

Since its founding, the Litterati community has picked up nearly eight million pieces of litter across 165 countries�

groups around the globe picked up litter and virtually shared the positive change they made. Over the three-week period, 768,673 pieces of litter were removed across 73 countries. While the litter was picked up only during a three-week span, the awareness of a powerful tool and the belonging to a global community working together to help better the Earth can last a lifetime.

The ALL_TOGETHER GLOBAL CLEANUP campaign was just the first of many ripples as we continue to educate, empower, and equip individuals to be able to contribute to a growing, impactful movement. It is

our hope with such large-scale crowdsourcing clean-up efforts and partnerships, we will make a lasting impact on human behaviour — stop littering and start picking up.

With continued use of the Litterati app and other tech-enabled sustainability platforms, people will inspire each other and increase personal responsibility to clean-up our home, planet Earth. Amazing things happen when you can connect one piece of litter with the collective problem. We can do greater things together for the social good: creating a cleaner planet and empowered citizens.

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THE FUTURE OF CARE

THE FUTURE OF CARE An ageing population means doctor and hospital visits are rising, putting a strain on under-resourced healthcare providers around the world. Dutch company Luscii believes its app, which allows doctors to monitor their patients remotely, has the answer. We spoke to its founder and CEO, Dr Daan Dohmen INTERVIEW BY: Daniel Brigham

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he world is getting older. According to the Office of National Statistics, the number of people aged over 60 globally will rise from the current 12.3% to 21.3% by 2050. An ageing population means an increasing demand on health services, with 29% of people in the UK aged between 60 and 64 suffering from two or more chronic conditions; a figure that rises to almost half in those aged 75 and over.

Not only does that put a strain on GP surgeries and hospitals but regular visits can take a toll on patients. No one, after all, likes going to the doctor. The Netherlands has been tackling this issue head-on. Luscii, a remote healthcare platform that was designed in the Netherlands, is currently used in over half 66

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of Dutch hospitals. Its goal is to reduce unnecessary GP contact, reduce A&E visits and reduce the length of patient hospital stays.

The Luscii app is designed to allow patients to take on a more active role in their own healthcare, measuring their vital values at home each day and answering questions about their well-being. From this data, the patient receives direct and personalised guidance for their condition. A proprietary AI within the platform monitors for any sign of measurement abnormalities which could mean medical attention being required. When this happens, the platform instantly alerts specialists so they can make immediate contact with patients via chat or hi-res video connec-

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tion. In emergencies it can be escalated to have the patient to a medical facility.

Luscii’s technology is now playing a growing role in chronic care in the United Kingdom. All Together Better, a Sunderland-based alliance of NHS commissioners and healthcare providers, has deployed the platform for high-risk, isolated and anxious pulmonary patients who require continuous monitoring.

TFG: I’m interested in your background, Daan. You worked in a nursing home when you were younger and that inspired you to get into patient care?

Daan: Yeah. I wanted to become a doctor from around four or five years old; I’m from a family with a lot of doctors.

And that was what I wanted to do. So when I was 15, 16, I first started working in a nursing home as an assistant. I wanted to study at medical school but in the Netherlands it’s done on a numbering system, which is a lottery, and I got the wrong number. So that’s how I ended up in technical medicine – a combination of healthcare economics, medicine and technology. So that was actually how it all came together.

Now, patients only come in at the moment that there’s actually a problem. That way, the doctors have more time to really focus on the patients that need focussing on” Dr Daan Dohmen

TFG: What did that time spent working in a care home teach you?

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lady, who was around 83. She was in a wheelchair and had this thing around her neck, and one day we went together to a grocery store next to the nursing home. And it was like a secret because we were not allowed to go there because she had to buy her stuff in the nursing home. But when we came to pay the wheelchair got stuck by the check-out. She had to be freed by other staff from the nursing home, and I thought she’d probably had the worst time. But she said to me, “Well, Daan, this was the nicest thing I’ve done in the last 10 years, because the only thing I’m allowed to do is sit in my room and wait until the nurses come”. Maybe it’s 68

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a little bit dramatic, but I thought, well, what if we can use the power of patients to become a little bit independent? That would save a lot of time for nurses and doctors to spend on the patients that really need it. And that’s actually how the journey started.

One of the most important things that I learned is that in general in healthcare we were sometimes – and maybe still are – making people really dependent on the healthcare system. And that’s not because we want to do that, but that’s just the nature and culture of how a lot of healthcare works. We have to take care of you, which is true. But then when you look at the future, you see that we

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simply won’t have enough carers and doctors to help all the elderly and all the chronically ill people, due to the ageing population. So I think we should rethink how healthcare can be done.

TFG: Has the advancement of technology been integral work you’re doing at Luscii?

Daan: The fact that people do have devices that give them access to this kind of service is important. And we’re seeing that doctors and nurses feel and experience more and more that some care can be given remotely. Having a video chat with the patient in some settings can be as good as asking the patients to come to the hospital, and it will save a lot of time for patients.

The problem that Luscii is really solving is that currently in a lot of settings, when you’re a patient, the doctor will tell you to come back in three or six months for

your next check-up. But actually that doesn’t really make sense because for some patients, maybe you want to see them in three days because there’s a problem and things are not going well.

Or for other patients you might not need to see for two years because everything is okay. So what we are doing with Luscii is putting the technology in place that offers a 24/7 connection to the doctors and the nurses which means patients can still live independently and not feel they have to visit their doctor or the hospital all of the time, but know they can do when they most need to.

In the app the patients can do their own measurements, inform us how they feel, fill out the questionnaire or provide photos of some medication. With all of the data that is generated, the doctor can assess whether there is an increased risk with their patient. If that’s the case, they can set up a connection to the patient. I think

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that’s the biggest thing that we are doing right now. For instance, in Amsterdam, there are a lot of people in a virtual cardiology clinic that we support there.

And instead of all those patients getting in every three or six months now, the patients only come in at the moment that there’s actually a problem. That way, the doctors have more time to really focus on the patients that need focussing on.

TFG: So the essence of the app is making sure that doctors’ and nurses’ time is better spent on people who really need it?

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Daan: Exactly, exactly. At the beginning the patient might think they won’t get to see their doctor, so there is scepticism.

But what we give back to the patients is that they get a direct and instant contact at the moment they need it. So yes, you might not see your doctor physically every six months but if you need to see them today, they will be in touch immediately.

TFG: What kind of problems are hospitals asking Luscii to solve when they get in touch with you?

Daan: The biggest challenge I think for a lot of hospitals or acute care systems

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is that A&E visits are rising. So how can you reduce the number of A&E visits and still help doctors to be supportive?

And then the second one is how do you reinvent hospital admissions since they’re very costly and time consuming, and I’ve never met a patient that likes to be in a hospital, so they want to be at home. So that’s the biggest challenge. How can we prevent hospital admissions, but at the same time how do we make sure that we improve the patient experience? We want to provide 24/7 care but allow patients their independence.

TFG: To talk more specifically, what sort of data are patients entering?

Daan: We are able to build tailor-made programs. So we define digital care pathways. Let’s say for people with respiratory problems, people with heart failure and hypertension; depending on the situation they are in they will be prompted by the system to fill in their blood pressure, send in their oxygen saturation, and fill out a questionnaire with some questions about how they’re feeling; for example are they experiencing pain? We also provide them with educational lessons, which include watching videos on how to deal with their energy levels if they have certain illnesses.

We advise them on healthy habits and healthy foods that will help their specific ailment. So it’s a combination of support and coaching people to become independent or deal with their situation.

TFG: Is the data filtered for the doctor?

Daan: Our artificial intelligence, which sits inside the platform, will get those data points from the patient, and then it will run algorithms. Sometimes they’re really simple – a patient’s blood pressure’s going up will be flagged to the doctor, for example.

Or sometimes it’s more complex, such as a combination of measurements in a certain timeframe that might be changing, or there’s a negative trend. Then the docISSUE 06

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tor can reach out, or we can ask Luscii to take actions, such as sending a message to the patient to take a certain medication, or provide more information.

One of the things that we’re trying to do is improve those algorithms over time to make it even smarter. So when we started it was very simple alerts, like, ‘Hey, your levels are still high. Look at it’. And now over time, when we have more validation and clinical evidence, it’s getting smarter and smarter.

TFG: Some people are just naturally suspicious of using anything that involves AI. How do you convince patients that they’re signing up to something that will look after them when they most need it?

Daan: There’s one thing we do that’s maybe funny, but we use the power of the patient. This can sometimes be scary for the doctor or nurse, but we have experience in this: and that’s asking the patient if they want to have a direct contact with a doctor or a nurse whenever possible. A lot of doctors and nurses are concerned that people will say yes all the time, and be constantly contacting them. But the reality is that in the Netherlands it doesn’t get misused – it’s only used when the patient really needs to get in touch, and they don’t keep asking unnecessary questions.

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That comes from explaining to them exactly what it’s used for. So it’s giving power to the patient and trusting them to not misuse it.

TFG: This move to remote care is a big change of culture for doctors. How are they adapting to it?

Daan: When COVID hit the Netherlands there was no ability for people to come to the hospital. So that demonstrated, ‘Hey, what are other means to still keep in touch with our patients and be able to help them?’ If I’m a doctor, I want to have all my patients in scope.

I want to be able to contact them easily if needed. And I don’t want to spend a lot of time handling alerts and all that kind of stuff. So this allows doctors to give more specific care to patients who most need it.

My team and I did ride-alongs in Sunderland, one of our projects in the UK, with patients who had been discharged from hospital and then had a recovery-at-home team. But that team can’t stay with the patient, or keep an eye on them, because there was no capacity. But now they are using Luscii, so when the recovery-at-home team leaves the patient is left with Luscii. This means the patient knows they are being kept an eye on, and if they deteriorate the hospital will be in touch immediately.

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The biggest challenge I think for a lot of hospitals or acute care systems is that A&E visits are rising.

So how can you reduce the number of A&E visits and still help doctors to be supportive?”

TFG: Tell us a bit about how Luscii has been used throughout the pandemic?

Daan: During the first wave we saw that in every country we have presence in, such as Ireland, Netherlands, Nigeria, Kenya, Ghana, and other countries, we saw that a lot of people were really afraid or anxious about COVID. There were a lot of things unknown, but we provided a very easy way to connect with a care professional, but in a very efficient manner. So to give you an idea of the numbers, when we started, we had 50 doctors sitting behind screens calling 74

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20,000 users. That was in the first days.

Then once our algorithms were more intelligent, because we’d obtained more data, we had 160,000 users, but needed only eight doctors sitting behind the screens. The rest was handled by the system, which sends automated messages like ‘You should check up with your GP’, or ‘You should ask for tests’.

TFG: Where do you want to take Luscii in the next five years?

Daan: I think the most important thing is that we are expanding our footprint.

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We’re currently connecting with one or two hospitals per month, so this means we have direct integration into their EMRs [Electric Medical Records].

Then we start with one or two departments, and this can be cardiology or pulmonology or paediatric care. So expanding the footprint is important to let people experience that they really can deliver care remotely. And then the second one is that we are improving our programs and we are doing that in close cooperation and co-creation with the doctors and the nurses. So they

are the architects of this digital capital base.

TFG: With an ageing population, will remote aftercare become even more important?

Daan: Yes, I think so. The most important thing is that this is not a technology thing. We make technology and that should be very good. But the real thing is that we ensure we integrate really well in the care processes, so that it adds value for both the patient and the healthcare professionals.

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