Eat Together: Meal Delivery for Elderly who Live Alone
Eat Together alleviates the sense of loneliness in elderly who live and eat alone.
The world is ageing. According to the United Nations, the population of elderly is expected to double to 2 billion by 2050. In Denmark, half of this population is malnourished. Many of them are not motivated to eat well as they eat alone. They often also have mobility issues and are apprehensive about meeting new people. Eat Together is a food and friendship delivery service that leverages on the meals-on-wheels program in Copenhagen. Partnering with elderly support groups, the service appoints ambassadors who reaches out to these elderly. The elderly are grouped with other elderly with similar interests. With each meal, the elderly receives a postcard from another elderly in the same group and an empty postcard to write back. This is to ease them to open up to social eating opportunities (lunch gatherings) down the road. The service is based on a crowdsourced data platform that uses common risk factors to identify elderly who are at high risk of malnutrition.