VdA participated with Católica Lisbon School of Business & Economics and with BI4ALL in “The Financial Times Innovative Lawyers - Global Legal Hackathon Challenge”, an initiative also supported by the Vasco Vieira de Almeida Foundation and VdA Academia. The multidisciplinary team that participated in this Hackathon created the I-Dial, a platform that aims to help elderly people who, due to Covid-19, are in isolation.
The "Financial Times Innovative Lawyers - Global Legal Hackathon Challenge" aimed to promote the identification of solutions to the complex issues raised by the Covid-19 pandemic. This Hackathon, carried out on a worldwide scale, came at a critical time when companies, governments, legal systems and the population were forced to face enormous challenges of great complexity and severity.
In this global initiative, 170 projects were submitted, 225 organizations participated, making a total of 2700 participants.
Over the last three weeks VdA - with the support of Vasco Vieira de Almeida Foundation and VdA Academia - worked in partnership with Católica Lisbon School of Business & Economics and with BI4ALL, to meet the challenge “How to facilitate risk groups' equal access to fundamental rights while locked down or subject to restricted movement”. In this context, the team sought a way to help elderly people in isolation to exercise their fundamental rights, and to access essential goods and services. And, the result was the I-Dial platform which, through Artificial Intelligence and Natural Language, establishes the link between the elderly (and other groups at risk) and a volunteer available to provide the service in that area, allowing them access, for example, to medicines, meals, medical appointments or voluntary work in the security of their homes.
Volunteers are selected and monitored by the Associations, both registered in the I-Dial application, which records their tasks and performance.
This was one of the biggest legal innovation events ever!
