Empowering disabled people to choose accessible social housing.
The choice-based letting initiative pioneered by Communities and Local Government aims to ensure that social housing tenants have more choice and control over where they live.
There was a major issue with the initiative; some properties ideally suited to the requirements of disabled people would often be Let to able-bodied people, leaving a shortage of options for disabled people.
The Mayor of London’s housing strategy in 2008 set out to tackle this issue, with an Accessible Housing Register, which requires Councils to be able to assess social properties by category, and make it possible for individual disabled people to search against these for appropriate housing.
The key challenge was to carry out surveys and collect a vast amount of information in the field, in a format that could be easily and directly uploaded to databases and websites without having to return to the office, or re-input the data. As well as creating a recording process that would automatically classify the property being surveyed into a meaningful category.
Taking an early lead in this area was the Tower Hamlets Housing Occupational Therapy team, Mandy Ruddock, Housing Occupational Therapist, soon found that a conventional manual recording system was unmanageable, “Filling in ordinary forms and transferring the information to spreadsheets was taking far too much time, and leading to errors in categorisation.”
They turned to Destiny’s digital pen, which is based on Anoto technology, for a simple and cost-effective answer to this problem, which would integrate traditional pen and paper reporting methods with digital technology.
Destiny worked closely with the Tower Hamlets OT team to design a four-page accessible housing register form, making use of tick boxes for speed and simplicity. The design of the form progressed with the involvement of the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea, as Claire Wise (insert title) explains:
“A “tick down” the scale system was introduced, assuming at the start that it’s a category ‘A’ property (fully wheelchair accessible to the latest design standards) and then narrowing down. This means that surveying a property is no longer a specialist job – you just need the digital form, a digital pen and a tape measure.”
Once each new form has been written out in the field, the pen strokes are instantly converted by Vision Objects MyScript software into a graphical image of the original handwritten form, and a data file, then instantly transmitted to Destiny’s secure servers via a Bluetooth mobile device, or docked to a PC and sent by Internet connection. This data file also automatically determines the appropriate housing category, in line with the business rules.
The graphical image of the form and the data file are then transmitted on to the Council, either by email or posted to an FTP site. The whole process - from the form being written out and sent, to the completed files being available - takes less than a minute.
Kensington and Chelsea are also taking advantage of Destiny’s Manage service, which allows them to log on to a customised website where administrators can review, compare and verify the original handwritten version of the form against the converted text version.
The greatest benefit is that information on available properties can be added to public websites the same day as the survey takes place. By typing in the address of any property, web administrators can automatically pull category and access details across from the housing database and include them in the website information.
“Digital pen from Destiny has given us a swift and automatic method of data collection that anyone can use – as well as a consistent method of categorisation”, says Mandy Ruddock.
“We can get information back in seconds to our database, correctly describe a property as soon as it’s assessed, and advertise it the same day with the right information. It’s helping us to house people more appropriately, provide a more cost-effective service, and meet the challenges of the Disability Discrimination Act.”
“It's a privilege to be associated with such an important and necessary project” said Edward Belgeonne, CEO and founder of Destiny. “We're very glad to see the Destiny digital pen making information on accessible housing so readily available to the people who need it.”
Site Map:
Digital Pens