Mutual Assistance Living

Talk:Mutual Assistance Living

Mutual Assistance Living (MAL), or sometimes also called (Mutual Assisted Living, Mutual Assistance Community), is a new concept in assisting the elder people aging well. In the traditional way of providing services to assist the elder people for independent living, the elder people are always passively receiving services. Mutual assistances living claims that besides being assisted, people living in community may mutually assist each other, obtaining some kind of self-sustain. In a mutual assistance community, people who are able to help meet requests from others are encouraged to do so as informal carer. Eldere peoples may mutually assist each other to held group activities, younger may help the elder on physical demanding works; while the elder may also help the younger with their knowledge. The mutual assistance could best save the societal resources, while the elder people may also take more active living attitude.

The mutual assistance living also proposed the integration of services from both helps from human being and applications provided by assistive devices. Commercial venders can also be included in building up mutual assistance community, which allows exploration of business models.

Participant Model for Holding Group Activity
Some activities which the elderly people want to engage in may need more than one people to participate, such as walking in the park with someone else, playing chess, chatting, etc. The conventional approach to fulfill these requests would be, e.g. to send a nurse to the requester. The participant model tries to organize the elder people take group activities together, so that the assistance from other parties are spared, social resources are saved, and the elder people are less dependent on assistance.

Intergenerational Mutual Assistance
Intergenerational mutual assistance activities referes the younger and elder generation mutually assist each other with their strong side. The concept is: When people are getting old, their mobility is degrading, and they are becoming physically weak. In mutual assistance community, the younger generation could help the elder one on physical strength demanding tasks as informal carers. Though physically weak, the elder people accumulated valuable experiences and knowledge during their lives. They may use such knowledge to assist the younger generation solve their problems in works and studies. During this process, not only the younger generation gets their needed answer, the elder generation also finds an access to make their contribution to our society. Elders may find themselves still useful, stand with more active living attitude, thus avoiding the frustration of being useless. In this way the elder people could live with active attitude, and the social resources are best saved.

Integrating Human and Devices
Most works on assisting the elder people independently living focused on using assistive devices to construct the autonomous environemtn around the elder people. However, with out the participation of formal or informal carers, the devices will be not efficiency. In the mutual assistance community, the helps from human side and the applications from smart devices will be seamlessly integrated to provide the most suitable service to the people in need.

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