Reaching into patients’ homes – participatory designed AAL services

Abstract

Ambient Assisted Living (AAL) offers possibilities for promising new IT-based health care services that are resulting in new challenges for its design process. We introduce a novel approach for engineering AAL services (AALSDA) which combines methods from service engineering and participatory design. We demonstrate this approach by developing and implementing an electronic data capture system, NuTrack, for self-reporting of nutrition status. The approach uses different concepts for AAL service design and delivery: service engineering for standardizing and structuring service processes, reasonable IT-support for automation of parts of services that need no person-toperson interaction, participatory design to integrate end-users in the development process, and patient integration for personalizing and improving the depth of performance of service providers' service delivery. For illustration, we present the case of chronic disease patients suffering from impaired fine motor skills. Our approach is applied in a pilot study with prototypes tested in focus groups and workshops with patients, caregivers and physicians. The results demonstrate good applicability and feasibility of the concept, and provide new insights for the future design, development and implementation of AAL services.

Electronic data capture in healthcare—NFC as easy way for self-reported health status information

“…The design process generally consists of analyses, design, implementation and evaluation of an artefact [33,13], in our case the prototype inSERT. As users generally had no prior experience with mobile EDC services, and user involvement in system development is still an acknowledged success factor, we adopted the AAL service design (AALSDA) approach by Menschner et al [23] (Figure 1). …”

Challenges of New Service Development: Case Video-Supported Home Care Service

“…The earlier literature stimulated questions concerning the generic characteristics of development projects (Edvardsson et al 2007, Melton and Hartline 2010, Schindlholzer et al 2011, the challenges in processes and practices related to service development (Edvardsson et al 2012, Harjumaa and Isomursu 2012, Menschner et al 2011, Woolrych and Sixsmith 2012, and the impact of individual persons on the development (Ahn et al 2008, Ordanini and Parasuraman 2010, Theotokis et al 2008, Wünderlich et al 2013. New themes emerged from the empirical data as they were analyzed during the study: in particular, factors related to organizational change were recognized as highly relevant.…”

Live evaluation within ambient assisted living scenarios

“…Although with minor usage, methodologies like interviews or focus groups are also used within AAL scenarios [9,10]. However, interviews can only be performed at scheduled times and focus groups require several users to join and give their thoughts on a subject.…”