Action Design Research for Social Innovation: Lessons from Designing a Health and Wellbeing Platform

IT artifacts play an important role in solving societal problems and realizing social innovations. Existing practice-inspired design science research (DSR) approaches, such as Action Design Research (ADR), do not consider social innovation as an explicit starting point for design iterations. In this paper, we explore how social innovation as a starting point affects the ADR approach. By reflecting on a three-year long ADR project in the domain of health and wellbeing, we suggest four principles to extend the ADR approach: (1) Translate a societal problem into practical problems on a stakeholder-level; (2) Reciprocal shaping between social practices and the IT artifact; (3) Involve citizens early and throughout the project; and (4) Balance political, economic and societal values for evaluating ADR results

Prototyping a Health and Wellbeing Platform in a Living Lab Setting

A key challenge older adults face is the ability to live independently. Losing their everyday independence is a major concern for older adults. Partly, because they fear this could lead to an involuntary move to an assisted living facility instead of living independently. Since 2015, the Dutch government encourages their citizens to age-in-place, but at the same time struggles how to implement new healthcare regulations. To support both the government and the citizens, we propose an online platform to match supply and demand in the health and wellbeing domain. Such a platform should not only enable end-users to enhance self-management, but also support them to find solutions for everyday problems related to aging-in-place. To illustrate our action design research we established a Living Lab in a metropolitan area in the Netherlands, and developed a prototype of the proposed platform in a real-life setting. The usability of the alpha version of the platform is evaluated with six potential end-users. Their comments are input for next iterations where the ADR team will constantly observe the effects of the platform in a complex social process within the Living Lab setting

Main requirements of a Health and Wellbeing Platform: findings from four focus group discussions

Supporting the ageing population is a worldwide challenge as it causes a huge tension on societies, regarding to healthcare budgets, resources, pensions and social security systems. To support people ‘age in place’ we propose a digital matchmaking platform for health and wellbeing. Nevertheless, what should be the main purpose of such a platform is unclear. In this paper, we present the main requirements of a health and wellbeing platform based on four focus group discussions with 28 stakeholders and potential end-users. The findings show that the young elderly (55 - 75) can be considered as the main target group. Accordingly, we found that the most beneficial requirements are related to: contact with others, matchmaking for smart living products and services, and information about local activities. Our research adds design knowledge to digital platform literature and exposes the main requirements of a health and wellbeing platform, which are of value for practitioners in the field

Digital healthcare technology adoption by elderly people: A capability approach model

Digital technologies, such as online healthcare portals, enable elderly people to live independently at home for a longer period of time. Independent living, in this context, refers to the freedom elderly people have to live their lives in ways that they find important. Borrowing from the capability approach (CA) framework from Nobel Prize winner Amartya Sen, the core argument of this paper is that elderly people make decisions on whether to use digital healthcare technologies by considering how these technologies enhance their capabilities to live their lives in ways that are valuable to them. This paper develops a theoretical model of adoption of digital healthcare technologies that support independent living applying the CA framework. We follow a mixed-methods approach with a sequence of qualitative, quantitative, and qualitative methods. We find support for our theoretical model, specifically that the intention to use online healthcare portals depends on whether elderly people expect to enhance their capabilities for living independently by using them. Our study contributes to the information systems literature on adoption of digital healthcare technologies as it is the first that applies the capability approach. For adoption studies on digital technologies in healthcare and beyond, our study poses two major theoretical implications: (1) when considering how outcome expectations affect adoption, scholars should consider how digital technologies allow people to live their lives in ways that are valuable to them, rather than considering how technologies help to execute predefined tasks, jobs, or activities; (2) the availability of digital technologies should be considered as a mediator between outcome expectations and intention to use technologies.Green Open Access added to TU Delft Institutional Repository ‘You share, we take care!’ – Taverne project https://www.openaccess.nl/en/you-share-we-take-care Otherwise as indicated in the copyright section: the publisher is the copyright holder of this work and the author uses the Dutch legislation to make this work public.Information and Communication Technolog