“Sharing Stories, Sharing Life” E-Health-App

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Health and social issues are among the dominating concerns of our time. Netural has long delved into e-health themes, developing digital answers to the continuously growing need for efficient health support. "Sharing Stories, Sharing Life" is an exemplary project in this respect: storytelling as an antidote to widespread loneliness and a medium for social integration, both online and offline.

"Sharing Stories, Sharing Life" E-Health App

The initial situation

Chronic feelings of loneliness can plunge people into a downward spiral of social exclusion - a serious problem that plagues elderly persons everywhere in Europe.
The "Sharing Stories, Sharing Life" project aims to guide lonely people out of their isolation, including, and especially targeting, persons with limited digital skills.

To this end, the project´s medium is a storytelling training which motivates people to tell their stories, presenting them with new opportunities to share their feelings, develop social skills and counteract social exclusion, even in cases of limited literacy.

The project partners

"Sharing Stories, Sharing Life" is an Erasmus project. The Dutch Ouderenfonds acts as lead partner. Project partners are the Cambridge City Council in the UK, the RBS-Center fir Altersfroen in Luxembourg, the Austrian Life Tool GmbH and Netural.

The task

Develop an e-training tailored to the target group´s needs and limitations, for use both online and offline. This training will rely on face-to-face interaction with volunteer and professional trainers while using the advantages of digital solutions to capture and process stories, reaching out, accompanying and motivating elderly people who suffer from loneliness.

The solution

Netural´s contribution to the project is the Stor-E Tree app, a low-threshold tablet app that guides users through a coaching dialogue about storytelling: Inspiring questions, practical advice on storytelling, suggestions for story categories, the ability to save stories, retrieve them for later editing, and invitations to also make use of the storytelling experience in real life are prominent features of the solution. In addition, sharing these stories and making them accessible to others is an important cornerstone of this e-health project: Getting elderly people to tell their life experiences has helpful psychological effects, not the least because it increases their self-worth.

The Stor-E Tree app is the platform for working with trainers, ensuring that at all times, the storytellers have a person who listens to them. The digital solution is flanked by opportunities for offline/analog storytelling as part of a book project.