Matching values to technology: a value sensitive design approach to identify values and use cases of an assistive system for people with dementia in institutional care

Abstract

Abstract The number of people with dementia is increasing worldwide. At the same time, family and professional caregivers’ resources are limited. A promising approach to relieve these carers’ burden and assist people with dementia is assistive technology. In order to be useful and accepted, such technologies need to respect the values and needs of their intended users. We applied the value sensitive design approach to identify values and needs of patients with dementia and family and professional caregivers in respect to assistive technologies to assist people with dementia in institutionalized care. Based on semi-structured interviews of residents/patients with cognitive impairment, relatives, and healthcare professionals (10 each), we identified 44 values summarized by 18 core values. From these values, we created a values’ network to demonstrate the interplay between the values. The core of this network was caring and empathy as most strongly interacting value. Furthermore, we found 36 needs for assistance belonging to the four action fields of activity, care, management/administration, and nursing. Based on these values and needs for assistance, we created possible use cases for assistive technologies in each of the identified four action fields. All these use cases already are technologically feasible today but are not currently being used in healthcare facilities. This underlines the need for development of value-based technologies to ensure not only technological feasibility but also acceptance and implementation of assistive technologies. Our results help balance conflicting values and provide concrete suggestions for how engineers and designers can incorporate values into assistive technologies.

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