Supporting Safe and Independent Living: Findings, Themes and Concept Designs from a User-Centred Study on Digital Telecare

Abstract

Telecare technologies support people to live in the community safely. In the UK, the existing analogue telephone services for telecare will be switched off by 2025, as the telecommunications infrastructure is upgraded to digital connectivity. Internationally, analogue telephone services are also being decommissioned. The shift from analogue to digital presents a rare and major opportunity for new digital solutions that address current issues with adoption and use of telecare. This paper describes a user-centred study to design innovative digital telecare concepts. The main contributions are as follows: findings from user engagement activities, which identified issues that may be more important and less important to users; the synthesis of ideas generated through the design process, which identified four themes for future work in the field-community-based support, telecare you do not wear or notice, expand the use of telecare and introduce telecare earlier; and seven concept designs that illustrate how the themes could be approached.