Many metropolitan cities are facing sharp increase in aging population. In Hong Kong, for instance, the number of elderly citizens is estimated to rise to one third of the population, or 2.37 million, in year 2037. About 13% and 24% of these people are living alone or with their spouses only respectively. As they age and become more frail, the demand for formal support services will increase exponentially in the coming years. However, there is a severe lack of manpower to meet these needs: in HK, on average, each NGO employee needs to manage 10 elderly people at the same time. Some elderly-care homes also reported a 70% shortage in staff. There is thus a strong need of helpers for taking care of elderly people on a full-time, part-time, or voluntary basis.

We have been working on HINCare, a HKD $4M project supported by HK Innovation and Technology Commission. The HINCare is a volunteer management system with timebanking facilities (i.e., each person, after providing a service, can earn a time credit. The time credits are stored in the person’s time bank account. He/she can later use the earned time credits to purchase other services.) We have designed an elderly-user-friendly mobile app. The system backend, designed for NGO administrators, is cloud-based and generic. Essentially, any organization can use our system to support their voluntary work services easily. Instead of having sophisticated software installation, only a few customization steps are needed. The platform supports multiple organizations, which can enable more sharing of data and collaboration. Currently, HINCare has been serving 5000 elders in 6 NGOs. We won one local (HKICT) and one international information technology awards (Asia Smart Apps) and a HKU Faculty Knowledge Exchange Award. Recently, the HK government’s Community Investment and Inclusion Fund (CIIF) has provided 4 contract research projects to our team to further support their associated NGOs.