Your family away from home
Nesting place is a mobile oriented web application that has been built as a way of creating community between young university students and empty nesters and people whose families have left home.
This is the entry for The Indecisives to GovHack 2017
Australia's population is much older today than it has been in the past. Did you know that Australia’s ageing population (from 55 and over) has grown three times faster than the whole population from 2001 to 2016.
According to Australian Institute of Health and Welfare, there were almost 89,000 people with dementia in permanent residential aged care at 30 June 2015, representing 52% of people with a current ACFI assessment record. Dementia is associated with greater need for assistance in other specific areas of care.
At the same time increasing housing prices put a significant strain on young students. One of the main difficulties facing international students is struggling to find accomodation and to integrate into their new environment. Integrating into their new environment has been found to have major impacts on their health and wellbeing1.
Australia spends $239.34B each year on Health, Social and Welfare payments which is over half of the Total Budget of $464.2B for the 2017/18 fiscal year. Of this, $64.3B is directly related to Assistance of Social Security and Welfare to the aged.2
Over the last 15 years, the 55+ Age bracket has grown at almost double the National Population Growth rate, and represents approximately 48% of our Total Growth. This is a worrying sign, but it’s expected to continue, even escalate.
The impact of this is we have more Australians moving towards and living in retirement age, meaning we have more people dependant on Government Assistance. Currently we have 5 working people for every person in retirement, however this is expected to materially decrease to 2.5 people per retiree in the future causing significant budgetary challenges.
Nesting Place is the App that helps reduce pressure and burden on this segment within the community by identifying segments that have mutual reward, we are able to deliver financial, mental and social benefits that could leave a lasting legacy. Simply, utilising unused space in the elderly’s homes, we have access to cheaper accommodation for University Students making the cost of education more affordable.
This directly translates into financial support for the elderly improving their lifestyle and health3, while also possibly producing benefits such as reducing loneliness and possibly impacting dementia and depression. Students on the other hand help by giving back to our elders, perhaps improving “respect” that seems to be lost on many of the younger generation.
Most services these days such as AirBnb are focused on short term accommodation. Nesting Place specifically focuses on long term stay, and is all about building connection and closing the gaps between generations.
We have used the regional Census datapack to identify student population and average rental price in target areas. We use this data to identify areas with high student populations to advice both students and hosts how suitable an area is for student accommodation. As students are price conscious we use the average rental costs to estimate the average rental for a room in the area to indicate how good a price is. As we get more data we would eventually use the existing prices to give a better gauge of pricing. We also use City of Darwin data to advise of nearby amenities.
We have developed detailed prototypes outlining our application that can be found in the designs directory. Parsers have been created to load our required datasets into a mysql database and can be found in the parsers directory. We have also started creating API endpoints in the api directory to retrieve data from our database. Development has began on the front-end with a React application that can be found in the app directory.
[1] https://theconversation.com/why-international-students-need-to-make-aussie-friends-30820