scholarly journals They Don’t Care About Us! Care Personnel’s Perspectives on Ambient Assisted Living Technology Usage: Scenario-Based Survey Study

10.2196/10424 ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. e10424 ◽  
Author(s):  
Julia Offermann-van Heek ◽  
Martina Ziefle
Keyword(s):  
Technology Acceptance ◽  
Assisted Living ◽  
Technology Implementation ◽  
Ambient Assisted Living ◽  
Assistive Technologies ◽  
Care Staff ◽  
Survey Study ◽  
Technology Usage ◽  
Data Types ◽  
Professional Care

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.

scholarly journals They don't care about us! Care personnel's perspectives on Ambient Assisted Living technology usage: a scenario-based quantitative study (Preprint)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Julia Offermann-van Heek ◽  
Martina Ziefle
Keyword(s):  
Technology Acceptance ◽  
Assisted Living ◽  
Ambient Assisted Living ◽  
Assistive Technologies ◽  
Care Staff ◽  
Technology Usage ◽  
Disabled People ◽  
Data Types ◽  
Online Questionnaire ◽  
Professional Care

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.

A Drifting Service Development

2012 ◽  
pp. 311-323 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kai-Uwe Loser ◽  
Alexander Nolte ◽  
Michael Prilla ◽  
Rainer Skrotzki ◽  
Thomas Herrmann
Keyword(s):  
Assisted Living ◽  
Ambient Assisted Living ◽  
Service Development ◽  
Technology Usage ◽  
Complex Environments ◽  
Work Processes ◽  
Integrated Development ◽  
Technical Aspects ◽  
Sociotechnical Design ◽  
Digital Pen

Drift is one of the visible phenomena observed in an ambient assisted living project. In this project, services for elderly people were developed that would be ordered using a digital pen technology. In this project, the method of the Sociotechnical Walkthrough (STWT) for an integrated development was applied to clarify technology usage, technical aspects, and the work processes. This approach was combined with several other methods to form a multi-facetted sociotechnical design approach. During the course of the project several shifts in perspectives, breakdowns of understanding, and negotiations could be observed. This chapter describes how using this approach of sociotechnical design facilitated the identification of drift phenomena and its processing in service design. The authors observations also clearly show the limitations of up-front process planning for complex environments such as service processes.

A Multi-Disciplinary Approach to Ambient Assisted Living

2011 ◽  
pp. 76-93 ◽  
Author(s):  
Martina Ziefle ◽  
Carsten Röcker ◽  
Wiktoria Wilkowska ◽  
Kai Kasugai ◽  
Lars Klack ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Technology Acceptance ◽  
Assisted Living ◽  
Ambient Assisted Living ◽  
Medical Engineering ◽  
Interdisciplinary Approach ◽  
Healthcare Systems ◽  
Living Environment ◽  
Smart Healthcare ◽  
Interdisciplinary Research Project ◽  
Independent Life

This chapter illustrates the different disciplinary design challenges of smart healthcare systems and presents an interdisciplinary approach toward the development of an integrative Ambient Assisted Living environment. Within the last years a variety of new healthcare concepts for supporting and assisting users in technology-enhanced environments emerged. While such smart healthcare systems can help to minimize hospital stays and in so doing enable patients an independent life in a domestic environment, the complexity of such systems raises fundamental questions of behavior, communication and technology acceptance. The first part of the chapter describes the research challenges encountered in the fields of medical engineering, computer science, psychology, communication science, and architecture as well as their consequences for the design, use and acceptance of smart healthcare systems. The second part of the chapter shows how these disciplinary challenges were addressed within the eHealth project, an interdisciplinary research project at RWTH Aachen University.

scholarly journals Context-Aware AAL Services through a 3D Sensor-Based Platform

2013 ◽  
Vol 2013 ◽  
pp. 1-10 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alessandro Leone ◽  
Giovanni Diraco ◽  
Pietro Siciliano
Keyword(s):  
Assisted Living ◽  
Ambient Assisted Living ◽  
Assistive Technologies ◽  
Third Party ◽  
Modular System ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
3D Sensing ◽  
Application Requirements ◽  
Computational Resources ◽  
Traditional Approaches

The main goal of Ambient Assisted Living solutions is to provide assistive technologies and services in smart environments allowing elderly people to have high quality of life. Since 3D sensing technologies are increasingly investigated as monitoring solution able to outperform traditional approaches, in this work a noninvasive monitoring platform based on 3D sensors is presented providing a wide-range solution suitable in several assisted living scenarios. Detector nodes are managed by low-power embedded PCs in order to process 3D streams and extract postural features related to person’s activities. The feature level of details is tuned in accordance with the current context in order to save bandwidth and computational resources. The platform architecture is conceived as a modular system suitable to be integrated into third-party middleware to provide monitoring functionalities in several scenarios. The event detection capabilities were validated by using both synthetic and real datasets collected in controlled and real-home environments. Results show the soundness of the presented solution to adapt to different application requirements, by correctly detecting events related to four relevant AAL services.

scholarly journals A Radar-Based Smart Sensor for Unobtrusive Elderly Monitoring in Ambient Assisted Living Applications

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Giovanni Diraco ◽  
Alessandro Leone ◽  
Pietro Siciliano
Keyword(s):  
Technology Acceptance ◽  
Assisted Living ◽  
Ambient Assisted Living ◽  
Vital Signs ◽  
Ultra Wideband ◽  
Daily Activities ◽  
Smart Sensor ◽  
Body Movements ◽  
Ambient Lighting ◽  
Wideband Radar

Continuous in-home monitoring of older adults living alone aims to improve their quality of life and independence, by detecting early signs of illness and functional decline or emergency conditions. To meet requirements for technology acceptance by seniors (unobtrusiveness, non-intrusiveness, privacy-preservation), this study presents and discusses a new smart sensor system for the detection of abnormalities during daily activities, based on ultra-wideband radar providing rich, not privacy-sensitive, information useful for sensing both cardiorespiratory and body movements, regardless of ambient lighting conditions and physical obstructions (through-wall sensing). The radar sensing is a very promising technology, enabling the measurement of vital signs and body movements at a distance, and thus meeting both requirements of unobtrusiveness and accuracy. In particular, impulse-radio ultra-wideband radar has attracted considerable attention in recent years thanks to many properties that make it useful for assisted living purposes. The proposed sensing system, evaluated in meaningful assisted living scenarios by involving 30 participants, exhibited the ability to detect vital signs, to discriminate among dangerous situations and activities of daily living, and to accommodate individual physical characteristics and habits. The reported results show that vital signs can be detected also while carrying out daily activities or after a fall event (post-fall phase), with accuracy varying according to the level of movements, reaching up to 95% and 91% in detecting respiration and heart rates, respectively. Similarly, good results were achieved in fall detection by using the micro-motion signature and unsupervised learning, with sensitivity and specificity greater than 97% and 90%, respectively.

Reviewing Home Based Assistive Technologies

2015 ◽  
pp. 317-334 ◽  
Author(s):  
Panagiotis D. Bamidis ◽  
Evdokimos Konstantinidis ◽  
Antonis S. Billis ◽  
Anastasios Sioundas
Keyword(s):  
Case Studies ◽  
Elderly People ◽  
Assisted Living ◽  
New Technologies ◽  
Ambient Assisted Living ◽  
The Elderly ◽  
Population Ageing ◽  
Assistive Technologies ◽  
European Level ◽  
Home Based

Population ageing is an unprecedented challenge for human societies, which recently is globally tackled by new technologies. In this chapter technologies tailored for use by the elderly people termed ambient assisted living and e-health are discussed. Focus is only placed on those technologies that can be adapted for home use. Emphasis is drawn both on the technical front as well as on the application front based on recent literature. The scope is to make sure the audience reaches a sufficiently broad understanding of what technology is available for home use by elderly people. Applications and research efforts spent but also funded at the European level with a clear focus on those supported by elderly trials are provided. The chapter is enriched with case studies from various projects.

scholarly journals Assistive technologies at home for people with a memory disorder

Dementia ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 17 (7) ◽  
pp. 909-923 ◽  
Author(s):  
Laura Nauha ◽  
Niina S Keränen ◽  
Maarit Kangas ◽  
Timo Jämsä ◽  
Jarmo Reponen
Keyword(s):  
Family Caregivers ◽  
Home Environment ◽  
Assisted Living ◽  
Family Caregiver ◽  
Sound Quality ◽  
Assistive Technologies ◽  
Care Staff ◽  
False Alarms ◽  
Memory Disorder ◽  
Alarm Systems

The aim of this study was to assess in practice whether assistive technologies support and facilitate the work of a family caregiver or care staff, and whether these technologies support the independence of a person with a memory disorder. A comprehensive set of supportive devices and alarm systems were experimentally tested in the care of five test subjects in an assisted living facility by eight nurses, and in the care of four test subjects in a home environment by three family caregivers and one care team. Questionnaires, diaries and logged data were used to evaluate the benefits of the devices. Simple aids and alarm systems that did not need much adjusting were considered most useful by caregivers and nurses, though multiple false alarms occurred during the test period. Technical connection problems, complex user interface, and inadequate sound quality were the primary factors reducing the utility of the tested devices. Further experimental research is needed to evaluate the utility of assistive technologies in different stages of a memory disorder.

Privacy and Security Issues in Assistive Technologies for Dementia

2019 ◽  
pp. 221-239
Author(s):  
Marcello Ienca ◽  
Eduard Fosch Villaronga
Keyword(s):  
Assisted Living ◽  
Ambient Assisted Living ◽  
Wearable Devices ◽  
Assistive Technologies ◽  
Policy Recommendations ◽  
Privacy And Security ◽  
Security Issues ◽  
Legal Implications ◽  
Telepresence Robots ◽  
Effective Development

The collection of a large volume and variety of physiological and behavioral data is critical for the effective development, deployment, and implementation of intelligent assistive technologies (IATs) and for the subsequent effective support of older adults with dementia. Yet it raises privacy and security issues. This chapter reviews the major privacy and security implications associated with the use of three major families of IATs for dementia: ambient assisted living systems, wearable devices, and service robotics, especially telepresence robots. After exploring a number of both category-specific and cross-categorical ethical and legal implications, the chapter proposes a list of policy recommendations with the purpose of maximizing the uptake of IATs while minimizing possible adverse effects on the privacy and security of end-users.

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