Who is behind Lina
Forty years asking myself
what other people are missing.
Lina did not come from a market study. She came from the meeting of forty years spent alongside people on their own — and the day I understood what artificial intelligence finally made possible.
I never chose to look after other people: it imposed itself, every time in the same way. Someone is left out, not for lack of will, but for lack of a simple means — a course they are refused, a door they dare not push open, a device nobody has shown them.
So I try to build that means. It has been going on for forty years.
The path
The same gesture five times,
across forty years.
A fire on a bridge
In December 1980, Joël Albert witnessed a tragedy on the Pont Bessières in Lausanne. He pitched a tent there so that it would not happen again in indifference, and he lit a fire. Five years later I was fourteen, and I joined him.
Every year end since, volunteers have taken turns on that bridge, day and night, in teams of three and shifts of eight hours. A coffee, a chair by the flames. Above all, someone listening.
A course we were refused
Under eighteen, nobody would let us learn first aid. With five other young people we founded Les jeunes secouristes lausannois to fill that gap.
Six hundred meals in four days
The main hall of Entre-Bois in Lausanne was turned into a Resto du Cœur. Six hundred people were welcomed and served there. The newspaper does not name me: it writes only «under the guidance of a 21-year-old volunteer». That was me.
Nobody should spend Christmas alone. Often all it takes is for someone to organise things so that it does not happen.
A device nobody dared open
There are devices that save lives, mounted in stations and public halls. But almost nobody knows where they are, or dares to open them — when in cardiac arrest it is the first five minutes that decide.
We presented French-speaking municipalities with a unit designed to lift that fear: a defibrillator as simple as a fire extinguisher, together with training open to everyone.
One trade, three licences
For more than ten years I ran a private alarm and security company, under a Vaud licence. Since 2014 I have run a restaurant, with the restaurateur's licence. And I teach first aid.
Three trades with no obvious connection. Yet they teach the same thing: protect without watching over, welcome without judging, and repeat a gesture until it becomes simple for the person learning it.
The fire, still
The action on the bridge took the name Feu Solidarité Bessières and widened its welcome: no longer only people in danger, but everyone left alone by the festive season. I chair the association and share responsibility for the watch with Aline Jaquier.
None of this would hold without a committee and remarkable volunteers. Those who put up the installation before the holidays and take it down in January. Those who take the night shifts, three at a time, for eight hours, while everyone else is at table. And those who come to bring, as the association puts it, «just some humanity».
Forty years on, the fire is still burning. Because they are there.
The trigger
And then, one evening,
a documentary.
Older people who could have stayed at home, moved almost by force, for want of anything else.
They raised children. They worked a whole life to build themselves a home. And they are moved out of it.
When health requires it, the care home is the right answer, and the staff there do work that nothing can replace. But when it is only a matter of bearings fading, of ties loosening, of a routine to keep going — then today's technology can change the outcome. It did not exist twenty years ago. It exists now.
It was exactly the pattern I had known since I was fourteen: people set aside, not for want of a solution, but because nobody had made it reachable for them.
A common assumption
What gets taken
for stubbornness.
When an older person refuses to leave their house, people readily call it stubbornness. It is almost always something else: the fear of losing their bearings, their independence, their former life — and the sense that once the door closes, nothing will be decided with them again.
These situations sometimes go very far. Families tear themselves apart, courts rule, and despair takes forms nobody saw coming. We read about these tragedies in the papers without always hearing what they are saying: someone fought to stay in their own home, and found no other way left to make it known.
Lina does not settle family disputes. But when staying at home comes down to a few bearings, a few reminders and a connection that does not break, she can tip the balance — before it turns into a trial of strength.
A face
He never knew this.
Others will.
Aline was caring for a young man who became quadriplegic at sixteen, after diving into a lake that was too shallow.
I often think of him. A tablet that obeys the voice, that calls someone close without needing to be touched, that reads a message aloud — I know it would have delighted him straight away.
What changed
For forty years,
the tool did not exist.
That is the hardest part to admit: I saw what was missing for a whole lifetime without being able to supply it. A computer demanded that you learn its language — never the other way round. And you do not ask an eighty-five-year-old woman to learn computing for the right to stay in her own home.
For three years I have been training in automation, development and artificial intelligence. That is where something shifted. For the first time a machine can understand a sentence that comes out wrong, repeat itself ten times without losing patience, read a message aloud, recall an appointment at the right moment — with nothing for the person to learn.
It is not the technology that interests me. It is what it finally makes possible: staying at home, in your own house, with your own bearings and your own pet — instead of being moved out.
So I built Lina. Imagined, written and tested in Bavois.
Lina was born
Not bought. Not imported. Born of a path that began on a bridge, forty-one years earlier.
« I never replace human beings. I bring them closer. »— Lina
Herbert Stock
On a day out in Kitzbühel with my daughter Lina.
A clear framework
What Lina
will never be.
Présence+ is a non-medical support service. Lina does not treat, does not watch over anyone, and replaces neither family, nor professionals, nor the emergency services.
Forty years of keeping watch taught me the exact opposite of a machine that would replace someone: nothing replaces a presence. Lina exists to make it possible more often.
La Main Tendue — 143, day and night, free and anonymous. For young people — 147. Life-threatening emergencies — 144.
Let us build what comes next
Would you like to be part of it?
Municipalities, partners and sponsors: this story only moves forward with people.