Tapping Into the Wells of Social Energy: A Case Study Based on Falls Identification

Abstract: Are purely technological solutions the best answer we can get to the shortcomings our organizations are often experiencing today? The results we gathered in this work lead us to giving a negative answer to such question. Science and technology are powerful boosters, though when they are applied to the "local, static organization of an obsolete yesterday" they fail to translate in the solutions we need to our problems. Our stance here is that those boosters should be applied to novel, distributed, and dynamic models able to allow us to escape from the local minima our societies are currently locked in. One such model is simulated in this paper to demonstrate how it may be possible to tap into the vast basins of social energy of our human societies to realize ubiquitous computing sociotechnical services for the identification and timely response to falls.