Consortium wins funding to develop specialist NFC TSM for home healthcare services

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A new consortium formed by IT services provider Extelia, NFC specialist Inside Contactless and French regional social services provider Abrapa has won funding from the French government to develop a trusted third party platform designed to deliver an improved service to the elderly and other recipients of home care services.

The partners plan to employ a combination of NFC-enabled mobile phones and contactless identification cards, stickers, fobs and USB NFC dongles to record and validate the delivery of services to clients’ homes and automate billing processes.

When a service provider visits a client’s home they will use an NFC phone to read the client’s ID credential, which will log the start time and location and validate the client. The parties will perform a similar transaction at the end of the visit, allowing the application to record the duration of the visit and transmit all transaction data to Extelia’s cloud-based platform. This will then update service appointment schedules, initiate the billing process and distribute invoices appropriately to clients and the government agencies supporting the services.

The three companies have formed a consortium to develop the trusted third party (TTP) platform that will be used to deliver the new services and have received a grant from France’s Ministry of Economy, Industry and Employment to bring it to market.

The project, known as Confiance, is being lead by Extelia’s innovation department and is expected to be completed and demonstrated in mid-2011. Extelia will develop, host and operate the trusted third party platform, optimize business processes and workflows for Abrapa and coordinate and communicate service delivery transactions between Abrapa’s service personnel and their IT services provider, GIES. Abrapa is also responsible for developing the functional specifications for the project.

Inside Contactless will develop the NFC application for the mobile phones used to record and communicate the service delivery transactions to the Extelia platform and will supply the cards, stickers, fobs and USB NFC dongles issued to clients.

“By developing this trusted third party platform, our group hopes to bring greater trust and efficiency to the delivery of social services for the elderly and others who need home care by improving the workflow and optimizing the business processes of the services agency, including the novel use of contactless technologies to record and validate transactions,” says Jean-Luc Fretard, innovation director at Extelia.

“We believe this platform will greatly improve the reliability of these services, lower the cost to deliver them and, most importantly, improve the quality of life for the recipients of these services.”

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