Voice-Based Notification of Care Workers’ Arrival Time: Concept, Implementation and Validation in a Pilot Study

Abstract

Due to population aging, the need for home care has increased. This leads not only to staff shortages, but also to planning challenges for care organizations. Rescheduling home visits places a strain on everyone involved in care provision. Above all, it is a difficulty for care-service users and their relatives that the only way of getting information about changes in care visits is to call the care organization. These additional phonecalls add to the stress of care workers. This paper presents an ICT service that allows home-care service users to request the arrival time for a care worker’s next visit using a voice-based approach. The voice-supported service, ‘notification of care workers’ arrival time’, uses two-stage data processing to predict the time of the visit the closer it gets. In the first step, staff-scheduling data is used; in the second step, the data is enriched with the individual care worker’s current movement data. This approach was tested in a pilot in 2021 and validated using data for 174 care-service users and 26 care workers. Improvements for future research are suggested.