Institutional portal - Municipality of Milan

Milan, November 22 2019 – The experimentation of the life-saving bracelet starts from Municipality 3, a device capable of improving social and health care for elderly citizens and in particular the effectiveness of interventions in emergency situations, when those being helped are often not in a position to collaborate . 

Some elderly volunteers from Municipality 3 will be equipped with a device equipped with a QR code whose reading, for example by ambulance staff, communicates to the operators the name and tax code of the person, the personal emergency telephone numbers to call (numbers I.C.E.) and informs them that the person rescued is in possession of a Life-Saving Identity Card (C.I.S.), containing his basic socio-health information, which has previously been collected, validated by the family doctor and stored. 

The intervention of healthcare workers, who will immediately have valuable data on the clinical and socio-environmental picture of the patient, will thus be able to take place much more quickly. 

The experiment, promoted by the president of the Social Policies Council Commission Angelica Vasile and by Massimo Scarinzi and Sergio Boniolo of Municipality 3, scheduled in this first phase until the end of the year for around two hundred elderly people, was made possible by the collaboration of the Regional Emergency Agency Urgency (AREU) and the Polytechnic of Milan.

“This initiative – declares the councilor for social and housing policies Gabriele Rabaiotti – is part of the 'More involved and safer citizens' project, born in 2012 to facilitate rescue operations in medical-health emergency situations. Among the tools of this type already tested among tenants of public housing there is the red envelope which contains personal and clinical information and which the interested party must keep in a clearly visible position at home. The bracelet, exploiting technology as a life-saving tool, is a further step forward in the direction of ever greater attention to the care of the elderly, especially those who live alone".

The life-saving bracelet is part of the broader project "More involved and safer citizens" launched by the Department of Social and Housing Policies, with the collaboration of the non-profit organization Medici Volontari Italiani, which has created and made available an application for the digital management of information socio-healthcare.

“More involved and safer citizens” is a prevention and social inclusion program, which over two thousand people have signed up to date. It was born in 2013 as an initiative to protect lonely elderly people, with the aim of strengthening the sense of psycho-physical safety in everyday domestic life and facilitating rescue operations. This occurs through three tools: the Red Envelope, a folder that the interested party must keep displayed in their home and which contains in paper form the certified "life-saving" socio-demographic and clinical information of the person and the emergency telephone numbers, the Salvavita Identity, a document with the same data as the Red Envelope that the interested party must always carry with him, like a normal identity card and the Salvavita bracelet.