Requirements of a Supportive Environment for People on the Autism Spectrum: A Human-Centered Design Story

People on the autism spectrum have a different perception of the environment than neurotypical people and often require support in various activities of daily living. Assistive technology can support those affected, but very few smart-home-like technologies exist. To support people on the autism spectrum in their autonomy and safety and to help caregivers, a smart home and interior design environment was developed. Requirements were gathered by employing a holistic human-centered design approach through interactive workshops and questionnaires to create a useful and user-friendly solution. From this process, requirements for a comprehensive solution (the SENSHOME environment) emerged. These requirements include a set of functionalities tailored to the needs of people on the autism spectrum, such as a crowd warning that informs when many people are in a certain area (for example, the entrance), an automatic light regulation system, or a daily life planner that supports task completion. Furthermore, inclusive furniture elements such as a refuge seat or a table with dividers can support wellbeing, autonomy, and safety. This paper demonstrates a consequent and considerable participatory research approach and the story from the target group and context of use through design requirements to the initial design solution of the SENSHOME environment

Home mobility hazards detected via object recognition in augmented reality

We present an Environmental Analysis and Safety Advisor system capable of identify the environmental barriers and hazards found in the homes of elderly people. This augmented reality tool runs on a portable computing device and can be used by informal and formal caregivers without specific knowledge of Accessible Design, to evaluate the safeness of an elderly home environment, ensuring that potential fall hazards are detected and corrected. The system recognizes specific indoor elements of the house (e.g. arm-chair, bed, chair), and then computes and analyses their mutual distances in the environment so that a warning of hazard is emitted in case of need (e.g. loose cable, not enough space to pass a wheelchair). In this context, we implemented object recognition at the category level of miniature versions of real sized furniture and the determination of the distance between neighboring objects, signaling if it is below a certain threshold value. Environmental Analysis tool can then recognize furniture and measure the distance between two furniture elements enabling the system to pop up an alert sign if the space left does not guarantee good accessibility.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Long-Term Care Challenges in an Ageing Society: The Role of ICT and Migrants Results from a Study on England, Germany, Italy and Spain

This report synthesizes and discusses the findings of a series of studies on the use of ICT to support caregivers providing Long-Term Care at home, with particular attention to migrant caregivers. The use of Information Communication Technologies (ICT) for health and social care is playing an increasingly important role in the context of the demographic changes. As, on the one hand, people are getting older and the need for care is increasing, and, on the other hand, the number of formal and informal caregivers is decreasing, technical devices are seen as a possible solution to this dilemma. At the same time, people in need of care and their relatives have a tendency to informally employ private care assistants, often from migrant backgrounds, to assist those in need of care in their homes with daily tasks, so as to avoid and postpone their transferral into institutional care. To better understand the current and prospective use of ICT to assist informal caregivers, and in particular those of migrant origin, JRC-IPTS conducted a series of exploratory studies, assessing the situation in Italy, Spain, Germany and the UK. This report gives an overview on the situation of domiciliary care in each of these countries; investigates the opportunities for ICT in home care and identifies drivers and barriers for the deployment of ICT by caregivers with a particular focus on migrant care assistants.JRC.DDG.J.4-Information Societ

Help2care: estrategias eSalud de autocuidado para usuarios y cuidadores basadas en el trabajo de Nightingale

To report the experience of design and implementation of the Help2Care (an ehealth program that aims to support informal caregivers of dependent people); and to identify its structure and functionality.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Human factors analysis, design, and evaluation of Engage, a consumer health IT application for geriatric heart failure self-care

Human factors and ergonomics (HFE) and related approaches can be used to enhance research and development of consumer-facing health IT systems, including technologies supporting the needs of people with chronic disease. We describe a multiphase HFE study of health IT supporting self-care of chronic heart failure by older adults. The study was based on HFE frameworks of "patient work" and incorporated the three broad phases of user-centered design: study or analysis; design; and evaluation. In the study phase, data from observations, interviews, surveys, and other methods were analyzed to identify gaps in and requirements for supporting heart failure self-care. The design phase applied findings from the study phase throughout an iterative process, culminating in the design of the Engage application, a product intended for continuous use over 30 days to stimulate self-care engagement, behavior, and knowledge. During the evaluation phase, we identified a variety of usability issues through expert heuristic evaluation and laboratory-based usability testing. We discuss the implications of our findings regarding heart failure self-care in older adults and the methodological challenges of rapid translational field research and development in this domain

Family care of people with severe mental disorders: An integrative review

Objective: to analyze the scientific literature on home-based family care of people with severe mental illness. Method: integrative review of 14 databases (CINALH, Cochrane Plus, Cuidatge, CUIDEN, Eric, IBECS, EMI, ISOC, JBI COnNECT, LILACS, PsycINFO, PubMed, SciELO, and Scopus) searched with the key words “family caregivers”, “severe mental illness”, and “home” between 2003 and 2013. Results: of 787 articles retrieved, only 85 met the inclusion criteria. The articles appeared in 61 journals from different areas and disciplines, mainly from nursing (36%). The countries producing the most scientific literature on nursing were Brazil, the UK, and the US, and authorship predominantly belonged to university centers. A total of 54.12% of the studies presented quantitative designs, with descriptive ones standing out. Work overload, subjective perspectives, and resources were the main topics of these papers. Conclusions: the international scientific literature on home-based, informal family care of people with severe mental disorder is limited. Nursing research stands out in this field. The prevalent topics coincide with the evolution of the mental health system. The expansion of the scientific approach to family care is promoted to create evidence-based guidelines for family caregivers and for the clinical practice of professional caregiver

Know thy eHealth user: Development of biopsychosocial personas from a study of older adults with heart failure

BACKGROUND: Personas are a canonical user-centered design method increasingly used in health informatics research. Personas-empirically-derived user archetypes-can be used by eHealth designers to gain a robust understanding of their target end users such as patients. OBJECTIVE: To develop biopsychosocial personas of older patients with heart failure using quantitative analysis of survey data. METHOD: Data were collected using standardized surveys and medical record abstraction from 32 older adults with heart failure recently hospitalized for acute heart failure exacerbation. Hierarchical cluster analysis was performed on a final dataset of n=30. Nonparametric analyses were used to identify differences between clusters on 30 clustering variables and seven outcome variables. RESULTS: Six clusters were produced, ranging in size from two to eight patients per cluster. Clusters differed significantly on these biopsychosocial domains and subdomains: demographics (age, sex); medical status (comorbid diabetes); functional status (exhaustion, household work ability, hygiene care ability, physical ability); psychological status (depression, health literacy, numeracy); technology (Internet availability); healthcare system (visit by home healthcare, trust in providers); social context (informal caregiver support, cohabitation, marital status); and economic context (employment status). Tabular and narrative persona descriptions provide an easy reference guide for informatics designers. DISCUSSION: Personas development using approaches such as clustering of structured survey data is an important tool for health informatics professionals. We describe insights from our study of patients with heart failure, then recommend a generic ten-step personas development process. Methods strengths and limitations of the study and of personas development generally are discussed