Atea and IBM accelerate the development of digital assistant services to support people with special needs

With the help of IBM Watson Assistant and Hybrid Cloud capabilities, Atea has further developed a tailored Digital Assistant Living Solution (DAL).

Atea and IBM (NYSE: IBM) today announced that Atea, a leading provider of IT infrastructure solutions, will deploy IBM hybrid cloud and AI capabilities to deliver its Digital Assistant Living Solution (DAL) to the public sector whilst addressing the strict data residency requirements from the Swedish government.

The COVID-19 pandemic has impacted elderly care services, confining more of the elderly population to their homes. As a result, demand for digital assistant services, which offers at home care services to the elderly, has increased as home environments become a more prominent part of their care. Atea’s DAL platform helps both elderly users and professionals within the service industry, helping to combat rising loneliness among the elderly population and helping staff manage increased requests.

A municipality in northern Sweden will be the first to try a version tailored for residents with special needs. The goal is to make users more independent and increase their ability to lead a good life based on their individual circumstances. It could be things such as sending out a reminder for when the next bus leaves or making an informed decision for what to wear based on local weather reports.

To start, the solution is being tested on a smaller group, but the municipality already sees more opportunities to adapt DAL to other parts of their home care services.

Atea’s DAL platform connects elderly people in their homes to care services through a 24” touchscreen and a digital avatar named Lilly built using IBM Watson Assistant. The platform also offers a high level of customization, so municipalities and regions together with Atea can tailor its capabilities to meet individual users’ needs, as well as integrate with other systems to create holistic overviews of users’ or communities’ health, wellbeing, and level of care.

To meet the strict data residency requirements from the Swedish government Atea needed to provide the assurance that the data would stay within the Swedish borders. With IBM Cloud Pak for Data running on IBM Cloud Satellite, Atea can extend services such as IBM Watson, to its clients and access its digital assistant services locally from its on-premises data center in Umeå. IBM Cloud Satellite performs security checks, compliance, and risk management at all locations where Ateas DAL data is handled.

“Through our digital assistant Lilly, we can increase the elderly's care and independence in everyday life while we reduce the feeling of loneliness and free up time for the staff. By keeping data and AI workloads in Sweden, we are able to help our municipalities digitize in a safe and secure way”, says Simon Norman, Head of Investment Areas and System Development at Atea.

“IBM is committed to accelerating digital innovation throughout Sweden and the Nordic by partnering with leading companies and leveraging joint strengths to solve the most complex challenges in business and society for clients with hybrid cloud and AI,” said Jimi Inge, Industry Business Development Director, IBM Sweden. “We are pleased to continue our long-standing relationship with IBM Ecosystem partner Atea and help them to transform their offerings for the rapidly evolving digital needs of the public sector. By leveraging IBM Cloud Satellite, Atea will be able to harness the power of IBM’s hybrid cloud capabilities, while allowing clients to securely deploy IBM Cloud services in any environment they choose – on-premises, across multiple public clouds, or at the edge”.

Therese Bengtner
PR-ansvarig
+46 72 598 75 61
therese.bengtner@atea.se

Atea är den ledande leverantören av it-infrastruktur i Norden och Baltikum, och drivande inom informationsteknologi på den svenska marknaden. Våra 2 500 specialister förser kunder med spetskompetens, produkter, tjänster och lösningar. Vi finns nära din verksamhet på ett trettiotal orter över hela landet, från Kiruna i norr till Malmö i söder. För mer information, besök www.atea.se