Manama: High school students in Qatar have highlighted providing professional care for the elderly among this year’s key challenges and, Ibtikar, Carnegie Mellon Qatar’s information systems outreach programme, held a competition to focus on the theme.
Nursing homes are uncommon in Qatari society with less than two per cent of its senior citizens being admitted in one.
Salma Limam Manswer, an associate teaching professor of information systems at Carnegie Mellon said that the issue was of “national importance”. With the number of senior citizens expected to double in the next decade, according to census data from the Qatar Statistics Authority, ensuring the elderly are catered for is high on the nation’s agenda, prompting the students’ focus on the theme.
The Ibtikar winning team, The Solution, from Doha College, addressed the issue of loneliness amongst the elderly. The group proposed an app that integrated all existing social media apps into one easy-to-use application, enabling the elderly to maintain relationships with family and friends effortlessly.
“The elderly population is rising every year and it was great to create technology that will make a difference in people’s lives,” Dulshan Jayasekera, member of the Doha College team said.
“We began the project through conducting some market research that ensured we created something that would be meaningful for our families and for Qatar.” The 22 teams of junior and senior high school students in the competition had six weeks to come up with an innovative idea to address the needs of Qatar’s senior citizens or carers.
A panel comprising information systems professors, senior students and designers judged the videos students developed to showcase their ideas and selected the top three teams. The participating teams were judged on the creativity and innovation of the idea, the information systems application design, feasibility of the proposed solution, research design and presentation skills.
