Abstract
Background: Technology-enabled healthcare or smart health has provided a wealth of products and services to enable older people to monitor and manage their own health conditions at home, thereby maintaining independence, whilst also reducing healthcare costs. However, despite the growing ubiquity of smart health, innovations are often technically driven, and the older user does not often have input into design. The purpose of the current study was to facilitate a debate about the positive and negative perceptions and attitudes towards digital health technologies. Methods: We conducted citizens’ juries to enable a deliberative inquiry into the benefits and risks of smart health technologies and systems. Transcriptions of group discussions were interpreted from a perspective of life-worlds versus systems-worlds. Results: Twenty-three participants of diverse demographics contributed to the debate. Views of older people were felt to be frequently ignored by organisations implementing systems and technologies. Participants demonstrated diverse levels of digital literacy and a range of concerns about misuse of technology. Conclusion: Our interpretation contrasted the life-world of experiences, hopes, and fears with the systems-world of surveillance, efficiencies, and risks. This interpretation offers new perspectives on involving older people in co-design and governance of smart health and smart homes.
Highlights
Technology-enabled healthcare or smart health has provided a wealth of products and services to enable older people to monitor and manage their own health conditions at home, thereby maintaining independence, whilst reducing healthcare costs
Despite considerable investment in smart cities, there continues to be low public awareness of the concept. This may be due in part to an overriding emphasis on technology as opposed to engaging with citizens or users; this focus is starting to shift, as “while citizens tend to be the implied beneficiaries of smart city projects, they are rarely consulted” [4]
We held two citizens’ juries, where the difference between the two juries was that one group had previously been involved in the co-design of the content of the session (B), whereas the other group were new to the project (A)
Summary
Technology-enabled healthcare or smart health has provided a wealth of products and services to enable older people to monitor and manage their own health conditions at home, thereby maintaining independence, whilst reducing healthcare costs. Conclusion: Our interpretation contrasted the life-world of experiences, hopes, and fears with the systems-world of surveillance, efficiencies, and risks This interpretation offers new perspectives on involving older people in co-design and governance of smart health and smart homes. Smart cities is a public-policy term for the move towards cities with an increasingly digital infrastructure that enables the real-time monitoring and management of key services in response to changing contexts, typically within transport and traffic management, energy, water, waste, and healthcare. The latter is becoming an increasingly significant area, with “smart health” being a newly coined term to describe the emerging health paradigm enabled by such an infrastructure.
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