SERVICE (Social and Emotional Resilience for the Vulnerable Impacted by the COVID-19 Emergency) is a joint OU-Exeter-NTU project funded by EPSRC through the Covid-19 fund. It is a non-profit academic effort to understand and support the emotional needs of older adults impacted by the COVID-19 crisis.
- We seek to understand experiences of the pandemic among older people and their supporters.
- We are creating a non-profit and open-source digital platform which helps people support each other while respecting and protecting their privacy and security.
Our planned academic contributions are:
- To share multi-method datasets, presentations, and publications on older people’s experiences of COVID-19, well-being, loneliness, emotion regulation, and social support.
- Learn more about how small social networks can support emotional needs.
- Share methods for implementing adaptive and secure software platforms for social and emotional support.
The foreseen impact of this project will include:
- Advice for policy makers desiring to learn more about the lived experiences of older people and implications for care, addressing knowledge gaps identified by SAGE and outlining the key implications of the work for the UK Government’s COVID-19 strategy.
- Public materials that offer well-being advice resulting from our research.
- Opensource modular software architecture that allows for flexible adaption to address the social and emotional needs of diverse vulnerable populations.
Our advisory group consists of:
- Dr. Rowena Hill, who is currently seconded to the cross-governmental C19 Foresight Working Group.
- Maria Willis, East Midlands Regional Learning Coordinator for Social Prescribing.
- Caroline Aird, Age UK Exeter.
- Dr. Maria Panourgia, Consultant Geriatrician, Milton Keynes University Hospital.
- Prof. Linda Clare, University of Exeter.
- Prof. Bashar Nuseibeh, The Open University.
- Prof. Arosha Bandara, The Open University.
- Prof. Suvo Mitra, Nottingham Trent University.