Holiday work - Part 1: Understanding the ‘The Elderly Challenge’

1. The four key recommendations of the report are elder-friendly housing, barrier-free society, holistic affordable healthcare and eldercare, and active lifestyles and wellbeing.
2. One of the ways is to work with market players to offer reverse mortgage schemes for the elderly HDB flat lessees at commercial terms.
3. One way is to top up Medisave accounts of less well-off Singaporeans when there are budget surpluses. Another way is that family physicians should play an important role in the management of healthcare needs for seniors.
4. As a SST student, I can create elder-friendly products for them, suggest solutions to the government to improve the elderly's  lives, and do service learning to help the elderly.

Preston

Elderly Challenge - Observation 1

  Today I observed two elderly men walking out of a SBS bus at a bus stop. They were holding to their umbrellas as their support. They were the last to walk out of the bus as they took a long time to walk out. They were slow in their movements and seem very unbalanced even with the umbrellas. It took about 10 seconds for each one of them to take a step down the 'stairs'. They even held onto each other for more support when one of the elderly man almost fell down. When they got out of the bus, they walked slowly to bus stop. (I did not manage to interview them)
  I feel sorry for those two elderly men as they took a long time just to walk out of the bus. If this was the case, guess how long it would take for them to cross the road. we need to think of how we can improve their lives better and to save their time.

Preston

Personal Reflection (NEWater visit)

Hi, this is Preston here.
From this NEWater Plant visit, I have learnt at least 3 things:
1) Water is expensive and very difficult to get,
2) We could lose our water supply if we do not conserve water and find ways of retrieving them,
3) We must learn to appreciate with what we have and continue to save our water.

Also, I have learnt 2 concept from today's visit:
1) In order to make sewage water clean and safe enough to drink, it has to pass through two stages: the ultrafiltration and the micro-filtration. After those stages, the water is actually safe enough to drink,
2) To ensure that the water is really clean, it goes through the ultra-violet treatment to kill all other bacteria or other unwanted 'pests' from the water.

1 interesting thing that I have learnt today from the trip would be that the ultra-violet treatment was actually the cheapest item that they have in the factory! I always thought that ultra-violet treatments were very expensive, as they needed electricity and the light bulbs to run it.

As a student in Singapore, I can save the amount of water that I use everyday. Also, I can reuse the water that were used to mop the floor to flush toilets. I can also hold a campaign to teach younger students to conserve water in a right manner.

That's all that I have to say. See you next time!
Preston Ngoui

Sketches on 2nd March

Mind map for Project Journal

(Please click on the mindmap for an enlarged view)

I have edited this over time as I have my product idea and now know what I want to create. I have chosen to work on the question "How do we solve the elderly's forgetfulness?". At first, I did not know what I should create, then Mr Irfan gave me an idea of creating an elderly-friendly medicine bottle. I started working on it and it was a radical idea.

Preston

Sketches on 2 Feb 2010

Preston Ngoui

Sketches on 28 Jan 2010

Preston Ngoui