Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
interaction of the user with the system. This is mainly due to the fact that they understand,
on the one hand, that elderly is not able to be familiar with the new technology and on the
other hand, they are willing to increase the level of independence of the elderly but without
the cost of adding more stress to their daily responsibilities. In addition, elderly cannot
handle a lot of interactions with the system, since they are not familiar with the new
technology and have somewhat of an aversion to learning. We have also seen that this may
discourage use of the system, as the elderly may worry that they will break the technology,
so they would rather not use it at all than be the cause of expensive repairs. The users want
the system to be as automatic as possible; however, they also want inexpensive
technological solutions.
7.2 Future work
Future work on the service platform can go in several directions. With respect to the
technical side, it comprises mainly on implementing some of the suggested by the end users
enhancements of the user interface of the Carebox and the portal. With respect to
functionality, it can involve adding new services and enhancing the functionality of the
Lifestyle Pattern service to automatically generate (graphical) reports for deviation from
normal user behaviour. This service has also potential for improving quality of care for the
formal care-providers and saving them time.
With respect to the services support, efforts can be dedicated to offering the services as one
complete home-support service including acquiring the equipments, making the home
installations, ensuring help-desk support, training the end-users, maintaining the services,
etc. For user support, uploading short tutorial video-clips on the web portal for re-enforcing
the training process for service setting was a suggestion by the regional partners.
For optimising the installation process, a direction to go is preparing installation software
package with all needed settings and defining “a standard service package” in each region
with the most desired services that will be initially offered to all elderly who subscribe to the
home-support services and further re-assessed and updated if needed.
Taken as a whole, wide scale testing with higher number of test participants, more
European regions and for a duration of a couple of years would show delay in
institutionalisation and provide more real-life assessments of the services.
8. Results from the controlled study
8.1 Important aspects of the piloting process
Developing and piloting ICT services for older adults with cognitive impairments or mild
dementia and their family care-givers has been a challenging process. A system like the
ISISEMD platform is complementary to the daily support provided by the family care-giver
and the relative itself is considered a user of the system. In addition, spouses/partners and
closest family played a key role in the level of independence of old people with cognitive
impairments or mild dementia and also in ISISEMD pilot. In the process of piloting the ICT
services, diverse aspects played an important role - such as trust towards technology,
complexity of installations and the platform due to the fact that it included high number of
services. It is natural for this elderly user group to feel scepticism towards the technology
