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Session: Poster session II
Session starts: Thursday 24 January, 16:00

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Simone Boerema (Roessingh Research and Development)
Mark Brul (Saxion)
Charles Willems (Saxion)
Hermie Hermens (Roessingh Research and Development)

Abstract:
INTRODUCTION: With an increasing prevalence of dementia in the Netherlands from 235.000 in 2008 (1 per 70 inhabitants) up to an estimated 500.000 in 2050 (1 per 34 inhabitants), assisting technologies are needed to support care delivery in the home environment. Remote activity monitoring systems show the potential to support caregivers in providing home care to elderly with dementia by facilitating objective information on the activities of daily living (ADL) of these elderly. The challenge is however to design a system that complies with the needs of the contemplated users of the system: the informal and professional caregivers. The goal of this study is to elicit users’ needs and translate these into a functional description of a remote activity monitoring system. METHODS: A user centred approach is deployed to involve caregivers in the design process, by applying scenario based analysis supported with mock-ups. In three iterating workshops we involved 8 informal and 5 professional caregivers. The workshops respectively focused on: Eliciting global users’ needs, Defining a first set of requirements in a scenario analysis, and Evaluating mock-ups of user interfaces. RESULTS: Informal caregivers expressed the need for remote activity monitoring system as a reassuring tool, providing peace-of-mind, whereas professional caregivers expressed the need for objective information to support decision making in their profession of providing care. Both expressed the need for simple representations of the monitored information. The participants defined nine general ADL that they would like to monitor remotely: 1) mobility, 2) use of household equipment, 3) medication intake, 4) deterioration of health, 4) social involvement, 5) personal care, 6) daily structure, 7) sleeping, 8) eating and 9) drinking. Based on these needs both Functional Requirements (e.g. quality of sleep) and Non Functional Requirements were formulated (e.g. security/privacy, unobtrusiveness for the demented person, cope with unpredictable behaviour, and validity of information). DISCUSSION: Functional requirements were defined qualitatively on a high abstract level (e.g. quality of sleep). Participants had difficulty quantifying the measures and defining the needed representation of the information (e.g. quality of sleep can be represented by measures like: sleep duration, number of night walks, or duration of wake ups). CONCLUSION: We presented a first list of user needs, based on a functional description of an activity monitoring system in the setting of dementia at home. This list should be further specified in succeeding user centred design iterations to design easy interpretable monitoring information that represents the complex concept of human ADL.