In developed countries, 46% of the population believes that in the future our children will live worse than we do. And although there are still slightly more of those who think that, on the contrary, it will be better, the number of pessimists has been steadily growing since 2011. And if people then believed that the main threats were economic, then in 2017, according to the World Economic Forum, insecurity in old age (fear of losing the ability to work and health problems in general), environmental threats and the threat of terrorism were added to this list. More and more people are afraid local conflicts, global conflicts, and in general the general level of nervousness, anxiety, and uncertainty about the future is growing.

And this is a serious challenge for brands. Because if society as a whole feels this way, then brands that sell cool products and offer to focus on fun, on consumption, on unlimited possibilities of communication, in the long and medium term cannot count on effective impact these communications.

How can we help? The technologies we create primarily affect people's quality of life. And the needs will grow. And we are not only talking about elderly people, or those who have had some illness, or those who got into an accident at a young age. There are also those who want to improve their capabilities, including physical ones, with the help of technology. The number of young people implanting chips or other invasive devices is constantly increasing. The potential audience for the impact of such technologies is over 1 billion people.

Evgeniya Chistova

Graduated from Lomonosov Moscow State University, specializing in social philosophy. 10 years of professional experience in strategic communications and sustainable development in the IT/telecom sector. Since 2010, she has been heading the social responsibility department of PJSC VimpelCom.

The unification of gadgets and telemedicine is our near future. The law on telemedicine was adopted less than a year ago. Here we see serious opportunities to influence people's lives and to help ensure that people in remote corners of our country can receive prompt medical care, which is also in some cases it is necessary to save lives.

Our focus is on the Sustainable Development Goals of ending poverty and health and well-being. We are bringing new products, technologies and cloud capabilities to a broad range of vulnerable people.

In our standard service packages, we include solutions such as cloud sign language interpretation, zeroing traffic on important services, such as those for the blind. Or the ability for people with hearing impairments to contact a doctor or the police at any time using a remote sign language interpreter and decide what -these are everyday problems.

We place a serious emphasis on the older generation. They should not be excluded from the general process of internetization and access to services, which today in many respects are equated to a standard consumer basket.

PJSC VimpelCom

Shareholders: 100% - Veon Ltd., whose main co-owners are LetterOne of Mikhail Fridman and partners (47.9%), Norwegian Telenor (8.9%) and Dutch Stichting Administratiekantoor Mobile Telecommunications Investor (8.3%). Revenue ( IFRS, 2018) – RUB 349.7 billion, net profit – RUB 9.4 billion. Provides communication services under the Beeline brand. 54.2 million mobile subscribers (as of March 31, 2019).

There is another important project that we are working on together with the team from Skolkovo . It is about rethinking the problem of disability at the national level and bringing it up to the European level.

About the essence of the project. There are bionic prostheses. If earlier the prosthesis was simply cosmetic, today it is a multifunctional device. The main issue we are trying to solve is access to a remote rehabilitation platform using modern cloud technologies. Having a highly functional prosthesis, a person undergoes rehabilitation with the help of remote VR platform. Being included in a certain virtual reality, he must perform various tasks with the help of a prosthesis, and the doctor on the other side of the platform, thousands of kilometers away, can receive data online on how the rehabilitation is going. In this way, we help develop telemedicine as such, a person goes through the rehabilitation process in a more understandable and digital manner, and we fundamentally change society’s attitude towards the problem of disability.

Because if earlier children were forced to hide this defect, today such children are sometimes perceived by the collective as people from the Marvel universe who have a part of the Iron Man suit. So such decisions are very serious for us both in technological and ethical terms. Our mission is to transform reality and improve the quality of life of our clients.

The text was prepared based on the materials of the National Forum on Sustainable Development, held on May 22, 2019 by the Vedomosti newspaper with the support of the National Network of the UN Global Compact in Russia

Telemedicine from Beeline