Preferences of Informal Carers on Technology Packages to Support Meal Production by People Living with Dementia, Elicited from Personalised AT and ICT Product Brochures

Journal Title: Informatics - Year 2017, Vol 4, Issue 1

Abstract

Assistive technology (AT) can help support the continued independence of people living with dementia, supported by informal carers. Opinions and preferences of informal carers towards a range of assistive and digital information and communication technologies (ICT) to support food purchase and menu selection, including navigation and online shopping, and safe meal-making by individuals living with dementia were investigated. General attitudes and experiences with assistive technologies were first probed by means of a focus group with carers (n = 6), organised through the Alzheimer’s Society in Nottingham, England. A series of AT/ICT product brochures were then produced, describing packages of technologies to enable meal production. Task-specific questions were asked of carers (n = 10) at local Memory Cafés as to the perceived capabilities of each individual for shopping and meal-making. Carers were asked to make pair-wise choices in order to select a personalised brochure and to complete a questionnaire to elicit the practicality, desirability and affordability of specific products and to probe for preferences amongst key features. Opinions on ease-of-use, aesthetics, expected safety-in-use, independence of use and stigma related to the technology packages were also collected. Results showed that carers are able to make detailed choices and express preferences about assistive and digital technologies for the individuals in their care, and customise their enabler package. Most believed that having an enabler package would improve safety. Greater exposure of carers to newer digital products would be beneficial. The brochure method could be employed on consumer websites and by AT assessors.

Authors and Affiliations

Maria Laura De Filippis, Michael P. Craven and Tom Dening

Keywords

Related Articles

Domain-Specific Aspect-Sentiment Pair Extraction Using Rules and Compound Noun Lexicon for Customer Reviews

Online reviews are an important source of opinion to measure products’ quality. Hence, automated opinion mining is used to extract important features (aspect) and related comments (sentiment). Extraction of correct asp...

Embracing First-Person Perspectives in Soma-Based Design

A set of prominent designers embarked on a research journey to explore aesthetics in movement-based design. Here we unpack one of the design sensitivities unique to our practice: a strong first person perspective—where...

Temporal and Atemporal Provider Network Analysis in a Breast Cancer Cohort from an Academic Medical Center (USA)

Social network analysis (SNA) is a quantitative approach to study relationships between individuals. Current SNA methods use static models of organizations, which simplify network dynamics. To better represent the dyna...

Improvement in the Efficiency of a Distributed Multi-Label Text Classification Algorithm Using Infrastructure and Task-Related Data

Distributed computing technologies allow a wide variety of tasks that use large amounts of data to be solved. Various paradigms and technologies are already widely used, but many of them are lacking when it comes to th...

Utilizing Provenance in Reusable Research Objects

Science is conducted collaboratively, often requiring the sharing of knowledge about computational experiments. When experiments include only datasets, they can be shared using Uniform Resource Identifiers (URIs) or Di...

Download PDF file
  • EP ID EP44076
  • DOI https://doi.org/10.3390/informatics4010001
  • Views 250
  • Downloads 0

How To Cite

Maria Laura De Filippis, Michael P. Craven and Tom Dening (2017). Preferences of Informal Carers on Technology Packages to Support Meal Production by People Living with Dementia, Elicited from Personalised AT and ICT Product Brochures. Informatics, 4(1), -. https://europub.co.uk/articles/-A-44076