JMIR Publications

ABSTRACT

Background:

With the expected increase in the number of people needing care and the increasing shortage of skilled care workers, new care concepts are required. Therefore, digital and assistive technologies (DAT) and especially robotics can improve the situation of people with different needs and create opportunities for participation. For a human-technology interaction to have a high level of usability, DAT’s meaningfulness and effectiveness must be accessible to end users. Significant barriers to the use of DAT’s in healthcare are the lack of controllability and adaptivity as well as control functions that are too complex.

Objective:

The objective is to develop an interaction and control platform that is understandable to a layperson and has a programming interface for DAT interactions. The innovation consist of the expansion of usage and interaction options for carers of existing DAT in a more individually manner. This is to be achieved by combining modern interactive media, a modular software architecture and already available DAT.

Methods:

The project is planned as a mixed-method study in a longitudinal design with multiple user involvements and measurement times in collaboration with three care facilities in Germany. When assessing technologies, the satisfaction of the basic human needs of competence, connection and autonomy plays an important role in the actual use of the technology. These needs can be measured in the form of usability (SUS), the intention to use (TUI) and the satisfaction of the carers' needs (TENS-Interface/-Task). In the qualitative assessment, user experience is recorded using think aloud and focus groups in order to obtain information about potential improvements of the platform.

Results:

It is expected that the open DAT system architecture enables carers without any prior technical knowledge to assemble their individual DAT functional portfolio. The basic structure of the functionalities and applications represents a broad spectrum of health promotion in connection with specific tasks in the area of maintaining independence and participation and promoting autonomy. The risk of possible acceptance problems is significantly reduced by improving the usability and ease of use of DAT through active involvement of the end users in the entire development and evaluation process.

Conclusions:

The focus on collaborative development with end users can address the recurring challenges for implementation of DAT’s in care. User experience and usefulness can increase by generating feedback in the early stages of development of technical solutions. The results of the project will provide low-threshold access to interaction options for existing DAT as well as expand the usage of such technologies in an individual and patient-centered way. Clinical Trial: Deutsches Register Klinischer Studien DRKS00034195; https://drks.de/search/de/trial/DRKS00034195