Design Smart home with healthcare for the elderly - adrienerice/The_Chosen_Ones GitHub Wiki

Design Opportunity

Today, with the development of medical care technology, public health, personal health, medical equipment and medicine have all improved significantly. Due to the popularization and convenience of medical care, more and more people are getting better medical benefits and longer lifespan. However, population growth, especially the increase in aging, has brought a great burden to medical care, and the elderly may not receive adequate medical assistance. Therefore, in the face of such a severe situation, the public must pay attention to the welfare, medical and social needs of the elderly. With the increase of age and the decline of physical function, the elderly should pay more attention to their health in daily life. In this case, the development of remote medical monitoring is an efficient and effective way of elderly welfare, so people can continue to live at home instead of living in expensive and limited nursing homes or hospitals.

Smart homes aim to improve the independence of elderly people at home by acting as an ubiquitous and monitoring tool. With the assistance of smart home hardware and software, the elderly can carry out daily activities without the help of others. Through the connection of the IT network and ICT prototype, the remote monitoring system I designed uses smart home technology to collect and analyze user data (Ballegaard, 2008). If necessary, this ICT-based remote monitoring system allows doctors to monitor important vital signs in real time with less effort and cost (Bethony, 2017). It will also improve the independence, quality of life, medical quality and self-efficacy of the elderly. Some disabled elderly might need some special assistance, so a human-centred design smart home system will enable these elderly to interact with smart homes and meet their special needs (Callejas, 2009).

Aims

According to previous domain research, developing this ubiquitous Healthcare with user-friendly interface of functional hardware and software aims to increase the elderly’s independence, life quality, medical care quality, and self-efficiency. The technologies will nable medical staff to track important physiological signs in real-time with less human resources and lower costs.

Target Audience

Target audience is the elderly and potential elderly over 50 years old who need an ubiquitous smart home tool to track their health status and to improve their life quality. And also potential audiences are relevant stakeholders who are clinicians, homecare workers, IT companies, and older people’s families (Ballegaard, 2008).

Design Context

This research describes several inexpensive, non-invasive, and user-friendly transmission and detection systems for the elderly that use information and communication technologies (Deen, 2015). Improving the home environment using the same ubiquitous and inexpensive technology that has advanced in the information and communication age is a promising solution for ensuring the sustainability of today's health care systems. The useful technology to ubiquitous health care is using information and communication technologies (ICT). Also, wearable devices are recommended to monitor the activities and motions of the older people.

Based on this research and ubiquitous smart homes approach, my design is to create an application which can control smart home devices, track health status, and send emergency messages.This ubiquitous smart home healthcare takes care of users and is able to communicate with contacts in emergency situations. It is also important to detect symptoms of illnesses at an early stage and deliver appropriate actions in the direction of a healthier life immediately. And by sending notifications with vibrating and sounding from wearable devices, users can get immediate alerts from current activities.

An essential aspect of smart home’s interface design is the emphasis on usability, effectiveness, efficiency, learnability, memorability, safety and privacy. Some functions will be considered to design such as voice control, blood pressure measure, blood sugar measure, sending alert to clinicians, CO2 alert, heart rate measure and so on.

This new smart home has a user-friendly interface of functional hardware and software, so they are able to carry out everyday activities with less assistance from others. Improving the home environment using the same ubiquitous and inexpensive technology that has advanced in the information and communication age is a promising solution for ensuring the sustainability of today's health care systems.

Plan of work

  • Primary Research especially survey or interview (Week 6-7)
  • Initial Requirements and Design (Week 8)
  • Initial Prototype (Week 9)
  • Initial User Testing and Evaluation (usability test) (Week 10)
  • Prototype Iteration (cognitive walkthrough) (Week 11)
  • Final Prototype (Week 12)

References

Ballegaard, S. A., Hansen, T. R., & Kyng, M. (2008). Healthcare in everyday life: Designing healthcare services for daily life. Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 1807–1816. https://doi.org/10.1145/1357054.1357336

Callejas, Z., & López-Cózar, R. (2009). Designing smart home interfaces for the elderly. ACM SIGACCESS Accessibility and Computing, 95, 10–16. https://doi.org/10.1145/1651259.1651261

Deen, M. J. (2015). Information and communications technologies for elderly ubiquitous healthcare in a smart home. Personal and Ubiquitous Computing, 19(3), 573–599. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00779-015-0856-x