Startup AIUDO picks the best caregiver for people based on their pathologies and emotional state

AIUDO is committed to quality employment and decent work, employing professional caregivers with a real vocation in the field of service provision. The services offered include professional home help, hourly and weekend caregivers, and assistance for people with specific needs, such as those suffering from Alzheimer’s or Parkinson’s disease.

The company has been operating across the national Spanish territory since 2017, and in 2020 it expanded into the United Kingdom. Revenue for 2021 was four times the level generated in 2020, after spending nine months with Lanzadera, the Valencian business accelerator that supports entrepreneurs so that they can transform their projects into business realities.

In May of this year, the company launched a website offering teleassistance, physiotherapy, and home nutrition services for the elderly. Its teleassistance watch means the elderly person’s family and the AIUDO team are kept informed around the clock about the condition of the elderly person, as the watch will alert them of any emergency immediately. In physiotherapy services, AIUDO offers treatments tailored to different needs provided by qualified and expert physiotherapists, while nutrition needs are catered for through the delivery of personalized weekly menus.

We began the interview by asking Daniel where the idea for AIUDO came from, and he told us that it arose, like many other projects of this kind, from a personal experience.

“AIUDO came about some eight years ago. I studied social work and had done different internships with interventions with people with all kinds of disabilities such as Parkinson’s or renal patients, etc. I identified the need to find good care services within the sector. However, what really made me decide to launch this project was when my mother was diagnosed with cancer and we needed a caregiver during the whole treatment process. All I could find were traditional services, which didn’t itemize their costs properly, weren’t very transparency and used zero technology. It was at that time that I sought to incorporate these values and advantages into AIUDO.”

The services most in demand among users are hourly assistance or live-in caregivers, personnel who live at home with the person. Its services can be adapted to the needs of each user and the characteristics of each family, from small on-off jobs to offering round-the-clock care.

“As a social worker, I’ve always seen that, culturally, we associate care with an advanced stage of dependency, when the problem is already there. What we want to do with AIUDO is make people aware that care can be provided much earlier, to help with certain tasks, or to give a person company so they aren’t so alone, while always respecting the elderly person’s independence,” said Daniel.

“We select caregivers for dependent elderly or young people, and we do it in a completely personalized manner. We examine their characteristics, their pathologies, their personality, the emotional state they’re in, and then select a suitable caregiver for that particular case. We’ve been able to help more than 8,000 families who have benefited from our services.”

We asked Daniel about his participation in Fundación MAPFRE’s Awards for Social Innovation and what it meant for them to participate in such an event. He explained to us that in 2018 they decided to participate in the first edition, which proved to be a very valuable experience that was quite satisfactory both professionally and personally. In addition, he added, being semi-finalists afforded them the opportunity to learn about many other very interesting and powerful projects.

“These awards value social impact, innovation, technology, and services that add value to society, which is what we are all about. We decided to present the project because the Instituto de Empresa and Fundación MAPFRE were participating, and we thought we had a chance of winning the award. But we also knew that other relevant companies we could generate synergies with were taking part in the awards, and we weren’t wrong because the experience exceeded all our expectations.”

When AIUDO reached the semi-finals, the company had a team of 12 people. Now there are more than 40 employees in the office, apart from the caregivers. After participating in the awards, they raised funding that gave them the runway to continue growing and launch more services and verticals, all with a view to enhancing the quality of life of dependent people. It has also enabled them to go international, starting with the United Kingdom.

The support of Fundación MAPFRE and the awards’ network of professionals has allowed them to become part of a great networking circle that they receive lots of advice from. It has helped them develop and become what they are today.

Daniel explained that his plans for the future include continuing along the same line of providing quality and allocating part of their resources to continuing their international expansion.

He also emphasized his commitment to using more technology in their processes, by streamlining the recruitment and evaluation processes for caregivers and continuing to work on applying technology within the home. AIUDO’s objective is for technology to be able to anticipate situations beforehand and send alerts, so that the intervention can be targeted and the caregiver has access to valuable information that allows them to be aware at all times. For more than 40 years, Fundación MAPFRE has been working to achieve a better, fairer, and more egalitarian world. This is why we award initiatives that have a positive impact on society with the Awards for Social Innovation, which reward the effort and work of companies that, like AIUDO, seek to improve people’s quality of life.

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