Accepted for/Published in: JMIR mHealth and uHealth
Date Submitted: Oct 5, 2018
Open Peer Review Period: Oct 9, 2018 - Nov 22, 2018
Date Accepted: Jan 20, 2019
(closed for review but you can still tweet)
An Ecological Approach to Smart Home for Healthcare Services: The Conceptual Framework of Smart Servicescape Wheel
ABSTRACT
Background:
Smart homes are considered effective solutions for home healthcare for the elderly, as smart home technologies can reduce care costs and improve elderly residents’ independence. To develop a greater understanding of smart home for healthcare services (SHHS), this study accentuates the necessity of ecological approaches with emphasis on environmental constraints. This focus is based on two rationales: 1) users are inclined to perceive the service quality and service experience from environments (i.e., servicescape) owing to the intangibility of healthcare and the pervasiveness of smart home technologies, and 2) both service domains are complex adaptive systems in which diversified and undefined service experiences––not only a few intended service flows––can be generated by complex combinations of servicescape elements.
Objective:
This study proposes the conceptual framework of a Smart Servicescape Wheel (SSW) as an ecological approach delineating the extensive spectrum of environmental constraints in SHHS.
Methods:
The SSW framework is established based on a literature review.
Results:
Generally divided by perceptible and imperceptible servicescapes, the SSW consists of the perceptible Physical scape (i.e., hardware components, environmental cues, and human states) and Social scape (i.e., service relationships and social relationships), and the imperceptible Datascape (i.e., computing intelligence, databases, and communication networks). Following the ecological approach, each category of the SSW is subdivided and defined at the level of components or functions.
Conclusions:
The strengths of the SSW lie in the various application opportunities for SHHS. In terms of service planning and development, the SSW can be utilized to 1) establish the requirements for SHHS development, 2) associate with work domain analysis by defining component layers, and 3) understand the real contexts of SHHS for the enhanced prediction of diverse service experiences. With regard to service management, it can be applied to develop measurement items for the operation and evaluation of SHHS.
Citation
Per the author's request the PDF is not available.
Copyright
© The authors. All rights reserved. This is a privileged document currently under peer-review/community review (or an accepted/rejected manuscript). Authors have provided JMIR Publications with an exclusive license to publish this preprint on it's website for review and ahead-of-print citation purposes only. While the final peer-reviewed paper may be licensed under a cc-by license on publication, at this stage authors and publisher expressively prohibit redistribution of this draft paper other than for review purposes.