NSSN 3rd Ageing Forum · NSW Parliament House · November 2024
Healthy@Home — The Evidence in Practice
Presented at NSW Parliament House alongside NSW Health Minister Ryan Park and 26 speakers from industry, university and government. Professor Paul Egglestone presented FASTlab's evidence work on technology-supported care at home — arguing that meaningful measures of sensor-derived data should be front and centre of national aged care policy.
NSSN Grand Challenge Fund
NSW Parliament House
Minister Ryan Park
26 expert speakers
"I think we need to advocate for where technology and humanity work hand in hand to keep our parents, grandparents, healthy at home — and I'd like to suggest we make this an election issue." — Prof Paul Egglestone, NSW Parliament House, November 2024
Read the NSSN coverage →Digital health · HMRI funded · ARC
REGAIN
Stroke Rehabilitation
Stroke Rehabilitation
In development
HMRI Funded
ARC Connected Sensors
Challenge
Supporting stroke survivors between clinical visits requires a clearer connection between home activity, patient-reported experience and clinical review.
Evidence problem
The design challenge is to determine which recovery signals are useful, how they should be interpreted, and when they should prompt clinical review. Thresholds and escalation logic require evaluation.
FASTlab approach
Contributing co-design, prototype development and an evidence interpretation framework. Guided exercise, shared monitoring, escalation rules and traceable clinical review are intended capabilities requiring implementation and evaluation.
Outcome
Current status: HMRI-funded project in development with the research team. FASTlab is contributing evidence intelligence, co-design and prototype development to help translate rehabilitation evidence into a shared recovery pathway.
What we learned
The hardest design challenge was not technical integration. It was understanding what evidence would actually help clinicians, carers and survivors know when support might be needed. That remains a human judgement — the system is designed to make it more visible and reviewable.
Community safety · Co-design
Night Time Spaces
★ Good Design Award
Documented in book
Challenge
Anti-social behaviour in public spaces addressed through enforcement, not evidence. Communities had no voice in what was happening or what might work.
Evidence problem
No governed process for collecting community evidence, no framework for interpreting it, and no pathway from community insight to public space decision.
FASTlab approach
Co-designed with community to identify pain points, generate structured evidence of what affected behaviour, commissioned artists to respond to that evidence in the public realm.
Outcome
Good Design Award winner. A replicable evidence-led model for public space activation — community evidence driving public decisions, documented and transferable.
What we learned
Community evidence and expert evidence are structurally different. Both are real. The evidence system has to hold both without collapsing one into the other. That design principle runs through everything FASTlab has built since.
Education · Net zero · Government
Net:Zed
Net Zero Education
Net Zero Education
Active · Expanding
Net:Zed · NSW Government · DEWR · AGL · Intel · UON
Challenge
Net zero education programs delivered to students with no evidence of what changed in their understanding, agency or career intent — and therefore no basis for improvement or scaling.
Evidence problem
No measurement framework that could handle the complexity of attitudinal and behavioural change in students across multiple schools and regional contexts.
FASTlab approach
Developing and testing the Project JANUS™ evidence and measurement approach across student cohorts, using eight value creation conditions. This work informs the wider Evidence Intelligence Architecture.
Outcome
FASTlab co-founded Net:Zed, a net zero education company applying evidence intelligence to workforce transition, skills and energy literacy programs across NSW — working with NSW Government, DEWR, NZEA and industry partners including AGL and Intel.
What we learned
Attitudinal change in young people is genuinely difficult to assess. The temptation is to simplify it into something easily counted. Keeping the evidence honest about what it can and cannot support — and being transparent about that — is the harder and more important work.
In the field
22 documented case studies
The Elephant's Leg II
Edited by Craig Hight & Mario Minichiello · Open access · Common Ground Publishing