Consumer and Provider Perspectives on Technologies Used Within Aged Care: An Australian Qualitative Needs Assessment Survey

Abstract

We undertook a qualitative assessment of aged care technology needs from the perspective of consumers and providers using a cross-sectional survey that assumed a largely open-response format. We recruited a convenience sample of individuals aged 18 years or older, lived in Australia, and self-identified as either an older adult ( n = 133), an informal caregiver of an older adult ( n = 27), and/or clinician, healthcare practitioner, and aged care provider ( n = 148). Survey responses were analyzed using a descriptive qualitative content analysis approach to interpret meaning from written survey responses. We identified seven themes reporting that technologies used in aged care do not appear to be meeting end-user needs. Supporting the Technology Acceptance Model, consumers and providers perceive usefulness of the technology and its actual ease of use as drivers of acceptance toward gerontechnology. Ten recommendations are proposed to support technology use and the quality of aged care.

User Experience of Older People While Using Digital Health Technologies: A Systematic Review

“…Subsequently, the full texts of the remaining 43 papers underwent meticulous review. In the final analysis, 17 papers were considered suitable for data extraction [34][35][36][37][38][39][40][41][42][43][44][45][46][47][48][49][50] (Figure 1). original or customized questionnaire employed, and the digital health technology under assessment.…”

“…Subsequently, the full texts of the remaining 43 papers underwent meticulous review. In the final analysis, 17 papers were considered suitable for data extraction [34][35][36][37][38][39][40][41][42][43][44][45][46][47][48][49][50] (Figure 1). The System Usability Scale (SUS) emerged as the most frequently used standardized questionnaire for assessing digital health technologies among older people (n = 9, 52.9%) [35,38,39,42,44,45,[48][49][50].…”

“…Among the seventeen studies identified, seven utilized original or customized questionnaires [36,38,40,41,[43][44][45], of which four relied exclusively on customized questionnaires. [6,10,11,13].…”

“…[6,10,11,13]. Of the six original or customized questionnaires, four were developed based on the Technology Acceptance Model (TMT) [38,[43][44][45], one was created incorporating elements of both the TMT and the Almere model [40], another was derived from the Tilburg Frailty Indicator (TFI) [36], and one was created using relevant literature related to healthcare services, mobile services, and information communication services [41] (Table 3). The UEQ uses 26 pairs of contrasting adjectives to evaluate six aspects-attractiveness, perspicuity, efficiency, dependability, stimulation, and novelty-with scales from -3 (most negative answer) to +3 (most positive answer) [54].…”

“…Its core components are perceived usefulness and perceived ease of use, and these factors directly influence a user's intention to use technology, which in turn affects their actual usage behavior [71]. It has been used as a basis for developing questionnaires to assess user perceptions of new technologies [38,40,[43][44][45]. These questionnaires, which aim to measure perceived usefulness and perceived ease of use, help predict whether users will adopt a technology.…”