JMIR Publications

ABSTRACT

Background:

Various eldercare settings have embraced the utilization of the life story approach to enhance the development of comprehensive care plans. However, organizing life stories and extracting useful information continues to be labor-intensive, primarily due to the repetitive, fragmented, and redundant nature of life stories gathered from everyday communication scenarios. Existing life story systems, while available, do not adequately fulfill the requirements of users, especially in the application of care services.

Objective:

The objective of this study is to design, develop, and evaluate a digital platform that provides caregivers with the necessary tools to effectively manage and visually view life stories, enabling expedited access to pertinent information.

Methods:

This study followed a multi-discipline integration and user-centered design approach, consisting of four phases: pre-research, prototyping, workshops for prototypes, and usability testing. During the initial phase, field research was conducted in four nursing homes to discover how caregivers currently store and use life stories, as well as their needs, challenges, and obstacles in organizing and retrieving information. Subsequently, according to the users’ requirements, we designed a low-fidelity prototype. A prototyping workshop involving six staff members from a nursing home was held to collaboratively design and discuss the prototype's function and interaction. User feedback from the workshops was used to optimize the prototype, leading to the development of the system. Two rounds of usability testing were conducted with seven caregivers to evaluate the system's usability and effectiveness. The feedback was instrumental in refining and improving the system. Finally, the Story Mosaic system was implemented in a nursing home, and its usage analysis demonstrated its availability and user-friendly nature, effectively addressing caregivers' challenges in organizing and accessing life stories.

Results:

During the workshop, it was determined that the system consists of three main functional modules: 1) the hierarchical display of life stories, 2) the extraction and highlighting of relevant information, and 3) the generation of memoirs. Subsequently, through the analysis from workshops and usability tests, three key themes for functional optimization were identified: user-friendly design of the interface, enhancements to existing functionality, and the incorporation of additional features. Taking these findings into account, the design, development, and evaluation of the Story Mosaic system were carried out to ensure its usefulness and ease of use.

Conclusions:

The Story Mosaic system underwent testing and validation in a nursing home, involving a total of 16 older adults and a collection of 1123 life stories. Our future research will focus on evaluating the clinical application outcomes of the system.