Measuring the Use of the Active and Assisted Living Prototype CARIMO for Home Care Service Users: Evaluation Framework and Results

Cornelia Schneider,Harald Rieser,Birgit Trukeschitz

doi:10.3390/app10010038

Abstract

To address the challenges of aging societies, various information and communication technology (ICT)-based systems for older people have been developed in recent years. Currently, the evaluation of these so-called active and assisted living (AAL) systems usually focuses on the analyses of usability and acceptance, while some also assess their impact. Little is known about the actual take-up of these assistive technologies. This paper presents a framework for measuring the take-up by analyzing the actual usage of AAL systems. This evaluation framework covers detailed information regarding the entire process including usage data logging, data preparation, and usage data analysis. We applied the framework on the AAL prototype CARIMO for measuring its take-up during an eight-month field trial in Austria and Italy. The framework was designed to guide systematic, comparable, and reproducible usage data evaluation in the AAL field; however, the general applicability of the framework has yet to be validated.

Highlights

In response to the demographic change in Europe, various technologies for assisting older people have been developed in active and assisted living (AAL) projects [1,2]
This paper aims to contribute to the evaluation of AAL systems by proposing a standard for usage data evaluation and applying this for the first time to an AAL prototype, called CARIMO
The proposed framework was applied to evaluate the usage of the AAL prototype CARIMO in an 8-month field trial with test and control groups in Austria and Italy; the results are presented

Summary

Introduction

In response to the demographic change in Europe, various technologies for assisting older people have been developed in active and assisted living (AAL) projects [1,2]. These AAL technologies mainly aim to support aging in place. Usage data analysis is able to single out relevant features of a multi-feature system and facilitate the ability to assess the importance of newly developed features. These data enable us to identify target groups interested in the system and provide an evidence base for the estimation of market potential

Objectives

Methods

Results

Conclusion