Influence of User Factors on the Acceptance of Ambient Assisted Living Technologies in Professional Care Contexts

Author(s):  
Julia Offermann-van Heek ◽  
Martina Ziefle ◽  
Simon Himmel
2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Julia Offermann-van Heek ◽  
Martina Ziefle

BACKGROUND Demographic change represents enormous burdens for the care sectors resulting in high proportions of (older) people in need of care and a lack of care staff. Ambient Assisted Living (AAL) technologies have the potential to support the bottlenecks in care supply, but are not yet in widespread use in professional care contexts. OBJECTIVE The study aims for investigating professional caregivers' AAL technology acceptance, their perception of specific technologies, data handling, perceived benefits, and barriers. In particular, the study focuses on perspectives on AAL technologies differing between care professionals working in diverse care contexts in order to examine to what extent the care context influences the acceptance of assistive technologies. METHODS An scenario-based online questionnaire (n = 170) was carried out focusing on professional care givers in medical, geriatric, and care of disabled people. The participants were asked for their perceptions concerning specific technologies, specific types of gathered data, potential benefits, and barriers of AAL technology usage. RESULTS The care context significantly impacted the evaluations of AAL technologies (F(14,220) = 2.514; P = .002). Professional caregivers of disabled people had a significantly more critical attitude towards AAL technologies than medical and geriatric caregivers: indicated by a) being the only caregiver group with rejecting evaluations of AAL technology acceptance (F(2,118) = 4.570; P = .01) and specific technologies (F(2,118) = 11.727; P = .000) applied for gathering data and b) by the comparatively lowest agreements referring to the evaluations of data types (F(2,118) = 4.073; P = .02) which are allowed to be gathered. CONCLUSIONS AAL technology acceptance is seen critical out of technology implementation reasons, especially in the care of people with disabilities. AAL technologies in care contexts have to be tailored to care professional's needs and concerns ("care about us"). The results contribute to a broader understanding of professional caregivers needs referring to specific data and technology configurations and encloses major differences concerning diverse care contexts. Integrating these findings into user group-tailored technology concepts and communication strategies will support a sustainable adoption of AAL systems in professional care contexts.


10.2196/10424 ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. e10424 ◽  
Author(s):  
Julia Offermann-van Heek ◽  
Martina Ziefle

Background Demographic change represents enormous burdens for the care sectors, resulting in high proportions of (older) people in need of care and a lack of care staff. Ambient Assisted Living (AAL) technologies have the potential to support the bottlenecks in care supply but are not yet in widespread use in professional care contexts. Objective The objective of our study was to investigate professional caregivers’ AAL technology acceptance and their perception regarding specific technologies, data handling, perceived benefits, and barriers. In particular, this study focuses on the perspectives on AAL technologies differing between care professionals working in diverse care contexts to examine the extent to which the care context influences the acceptance of assistive technologies. Methods A Web-based survey (N=170) was carried out focusing on professional caregivers including medical, geriatric, and disabled people’s caregivers. Based on a scenario, the participants were asked for their perceptions concerning specific technologies, specific types of gathered data, and potential benefits of and barriers to AAL technology usage. Results The care context significantly impacted the evaluations of AAL technologies (F14,220=2.514; P=.002). Professional caregivers of disabled people had a significantly more critical attitude toward AAL technologies than medical and geriatric caregivers, indicated (1) by being the only caregiver group that rejected evaluations of AAL technology acceptance (F2,118=4.570; P=.01) and specific technologies (F2,118=11.727; P<.001) applied for gathering data and (2) by the comparatively lowest agreements referring to the evaluations of data types (F2,118=4.073, P=.02) that are allowed to be gathered. Conclusions AAL technology acceptance is critical because of technology implementation reasons, especially in the care of people with disabilities. AAL technologies in care contexts have to be tailored to care professional’s needs and concerns (“care about us”). The results contribute to a broader understanding of professional caregivers’ needs referring to specific data and technology configurations and enclose major differences concerning diverse care contexts. Integrating these findings into user group-tailored technology concepts and communication strategies will support a sustainable adoption of AAL systems in professional care contexts.


Author(s):  
Ashish D Patel ◽  
Jigarkumar H. Shah

The aged population of the world is increasing by a large factor due to the availability of medical and other facilities. As the number grows rapidly, requirements of this segment of age (65+) are increasing rapidly as well as the percentage of aged persons living alone is also increasing with the same rate due to the inevitable socio-economic changes. This situation demands the solution of many problems like loneliness, chronic conditions, social interaction, transportation, day-to-day life and many more for independent living person. A large part of aged population may not be able to interact directly with new technologies. This sought some serious development towards the use of intelligent systems i.e. smart devices which helps the people with their inability to use the available as well future solutions. Ambient Assisted Living (AAL) is the answer to these problems. In this paper, issues related to AAL systems are studied. Study of challenges and limitations of this comparatively new field will help the designers to remove the barriers of AAL systems.


2020 ◽  
Vol 6 (3) ◽  
pp. 388-391
Author(s):  
Roman Siedel ◽  
Tobias Scheck ◽  
Ana C. Perez Grassi ◽  
Julian B. Seuffert ◽  
André Apitzsch ◽  
...  

AbstractIn recent years, the demographic change in conjunction with a lack of professional caregivers led to retirement homes reaching capacity. The Alzheimer Disease International stated that over 50 million people suffered from dementia in 2019 worldwide and twice the amount will presumably be effected in 2030. The field of Ambient Assisted Living (AAL) tackles this problem by facilitating technical system-aided everyday life. AUXILIA is such an AAL system and does not only support elderly people with dementia in an early phase, but also monitors their activities to provide behaviour analysis results for care attendants, relatives and physicians. Moreover, the system is capable of recognizing emergency situations like human falls. Furthermore, sleep quality estimation is employed to be able to draw conclusions about the current behaviour of an affected person. This article presents the current development state of AUXILIA.


2015 ◽  
Vol 48 (6) ◽  
pp. 167-177 ◽  
Author(s):  
Olufemi Adeluyi ◽  
Jeong-A Lee

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