Care-giver tailoring of IT-based healthcare services for elderly at home: a field test and its results

One of the biggest drivers behind IT-based homecare solutions is the increasing aging population. We are specifically interested in "service tailoring" for the homecare domain, where healthcare professionals (care-givers) do the tailoring of services to support elderly (care-receivers). Our goal is that, using our approach, care-givers can create or modify services with less IT skills, time and/or effort, and care-receivers get services that are better suited for their specific and personal needs. As a proof of concept, we developed a software prototype of our approach. The prototype was subsequently used in a real-world field test at a care institution in the Netherlands to validate the approach. The validation focused on the usability aspects of the approach in terms of effectiveness, efficiency, learnability and satisfaction. This paper describes the design of the field test and reflects on the outcome of the validation experiments.