This document summarizes several case studies of assistive technology services: - COGKNOW helped people with dementia navigate their day through reminders, activity support and safety warnings. - NOCTURNAL provided therapeutic support for people with dementia at night through music, images and sleep monitoring. - A project in Belfast supported independent living for the elderly through a reablement program co-created with social enterprises. - A project designed social prescription services for people with long-term conditions like obesity through user research, personas and prototypes to improve health literacy and self management.

1. ulster.ac.uk
Case Studies of Services
for Assistive Technology
Maurice Mulvenna
4 December 2014

2. Outline
• 2010 research from Ofcom Advisory Committee on Older
and Disabled people (ACOD)
• Potential benefits of next-generation services
• Case studies:
• COGKNOW
• NOCTURNAL
• Co-creating service design for reablement
• Co-designing social prescriptions services to
support people with long-term conditions
• Conclusions

3. Potential benefits of next-
generation services

4. Potential benefits of next-generation
services
• To identify:
• New and near-future Next Generation Services that
have the potential to benefit older and disabled people’s
lives
• Includes existing services that could be enriched as a result
of faster broadband connections
• Potential benefits from such services
• Risks and challenges to potential benefit realisation
• Examining health and wellbeing, work and education,
leisure as well as other day-to-day services

5. Technology trends
• Cloud computing
• Software as a service
• Personalised interfaces
• Ubiquitous mobile
• Multi-modal high presence display systems

6. Health & Wellbeing Trends
• The research identified nascent trends that could benefit
from superfast broadband:
• Remote interaction;
• TV as communication interface;
• Activity, health and wellbeing monitoring

7. Health & Wellbeing
• Prolonged independent living;
• Increased physical and psychological health and
wellbeing;
• Improved motivation and self-management of health;
• Increased sense of wellbeing and security;
• More efficient, cost-effective, and targeted delivery of
services;
• More accessible communication systems.
Potential Benefits

8. “... through access to health trend information, people can
improve their own health expectations.”

9. Risks
• Accessibility
• Logistics, e.g. seamless technical integration
• Impact, e.g. potential for increased isolation or
dependence
Key risks and challenges

10. Issues
• Infrastructure: ensuring adequate, reliable network
infrastructure and connectivity;
• Usability and accessibility: international co-ordination to
support development of accessible products
• Cost: ensuring people are not excluded due to
affordability
• Implementation: more coordinated interaction between
stakeholders to minimise the logistical risks

11. Summary
• Next Generation Services promise the potential of
numerous benefits to older or disabled people.
• If the challenges to their implementation are addressed
appropriately, the opportunities for increased and easier
access to services could:
• promote more independent living and participation;
and
• help older and disabled people to lead healthier and
more fulfilling lives

12. Case studies of services for
assistive technology

13. Cognitive support
for people with
dementia

14. COGKNOW
• To develop and evaluate a user-validated remotely
configurable cognitive prosthetic device with associated
services for people with mild dementia
• Helping people navigate their day:
• Reminding function
• Activity support
• Activity assistance
• Safety warnings
Helping people with dementia to navigate
their day

15. COGKNOW
Helping people with dementia to navigate
their day

16. Night Optimised
Care Technology
for UserRs Needing
Assisted Lifestyles

17. Provide therapeutic support and guidance to this group of
people during the hours of darkness
– Investigate the needs of people with dementia at night
time
– Research new technological capabilities that support
sophisticated service offerings
– Offer therapeutic interventions using music and
familiar images of loved ones at bedside device
– Sleep measurements variables: quantity of sleep,
quality of sleep, rhythm of sleep
Night Optimised Care Technology for
UserRs Needing Assisted Lifestyles

18. Night Optimised Care Technology for
UserRs Needing Assisted Lifestyles

19. Co-creating service
design
Reablement

20. Reablement
• Supporting people such as the elderly to live in their own
homes whilst providing a programme underpinning the
skills and confidence necessary for daily living
• Rollout of reablement services in Belfast providing
interventions for older city dwellers

21. Project structure
• Working with social enterprises:
• Ardmonagh Family and Community Group,
• Engage with Age,
• Volunteer Now,
• Oasis Caring in Action, and
• Shopmobility Belfast

22. Project plan
• Ideation events
• Hackathons
• Capture user stories
• Agile software
development
• Validation by
stakeholders
• Scale up

23. Research questions
• Explore if the location context and mix of participants
created a beneficial effect in the process of capturing the
needs of the stakeholders. Specifically,
• Does this kind of experimental co-creation process
support ideation, and how?
• How does the creation of a ‘pop-up’ living lab that
brings together the triple-helix of partners - plus
users work?

24. So what could a successful pathway
look like?
• coders and carers
• ideation events
• mix the blend
• harmonise towards
user stories
• hack user interfaces
• build stakeholder
community

25. Ideation outcomes
• Data capture
• Data sharing
• Service Directory
• Governance
• Assessment model

26. Conclusions
• Experimental co-creation
process does support ideation
• Empowering heterogeneous
groups of people from different
domains of knowledge and
levels of expertise to ideate
freely and generate new
knowledge
• Leads to an improvement in the
appropriateness and quality of
the resulting service design

27. Designing Social
Prescription
Services
Supporting People with
Long-Term Conditions

28. • Obesity claimed to be the world's largest single cause of
mortality and morbidity in 21st Century with 40% of UK obese
by 2025
• Main causes are sedentary lifestyle with easy access to low-
cost, high-fat food
• Problem is how to build engagements with the pre-diabetic
obese to bring about sustainable change in lifestyle behaviour
• Paying customer is health trust but user is overweight person
(This is a society must-have but a user nice-to-have)
• Costs to health service to double in next 25 year (‘Diabetes
threatens to bankrupt the NHS’ – Guardian 2012)
Problem

29. Problem

30. Social prescriptions
• Links patients in primary care with non-medical sources
of support within the community
• “People with little money/time should have services from
the likes of government that don't add to the burden of
decision making”
- Eldar Shafir, Scarcity

31. Personas
• “low income people and
families are over-
represented within the
obese, pre-diabetes and
type 2 diabetes populations”
• “… as a value brand it needs
to offer low-income
consumers real benefits”
• “connecting behaviour
modifying innovation to the
hot spots that need it”
Psychosocial
model
Habits
Beliefs
A-tudes

32. Design Approach
• Adoption of design process to:
• Establish project requirements
• Understand user groups
• Consider user experience (UX) issues
• Develop and test User Interface (UI)
• Co-Design – working with client & students over different physical and
digital spaces
• Discover and develop workshops with groupings
• Discover user tasks (n=20)
• User personas
• User journeys
• User scenarios
• Develop ideas into prototypes (n=45)
• Disseminate digital prototypes

33. Develop ideas into prototypes

34. How different from these?

35. Differences
• More blended model of medical and social information
• Location-based services focus on:
• Activity measurement
• Sign posting to local social prescriptions
• Gamification – “The Biggest Loser”

36. Conclusions
• Individuals at a lower socio-economic level or
status represent a hard-to-reach group of people
who are often time and cash poor and may
benefit from greater clarity in social prescription
messages and communications aimed at
improving their health literacy and subsequently
their self-management behaviour and physical
and mental health.

37. Conclusions
• A tailored approach to health and wellbeing
improvement ensures that specific conditions
and behaviours are assessed before the
introduction of the individual to a ‘social’ activity
or initiative.
• Therefore, the likelihood of engagement is
stronger given the individual's involvement in
choosing from a suite of options available to
them in their local area.

38. Conclusions
• Prevalence of smartphone and tablet computing
uptake in NI is now significant
• Opportunity for a value brand for those in need of
personalised social prescription to be delivered
using smartphone technology
• Next steps are to revisit the user groups and
design live prototype

39. but…

41. Thanks!

42. • Potential benefits of next-generation services: All at Ofcom, ACOD committee members
especially Dr Laura Muir, and Dr Jonathan Freeman / Dr Jane Lessiter from I2 Research
• COGKNOW: Persons with dementia and their carers who participated in the COGKNOW
field tests in Amsterdam, Belfast and Luleå. The project was supported by the European
Commission’s Information Society Technologies (IST) programme under grant 034025.
• NOCTURNAL: Carers and people with dementia in Northern Ireland who contributed to the
work of the Nocturnal project, which is supported by the United Kingdom Research Councils
and the Technology Strategy Board’s Assisted Living Innovation Platform under grant award
TS/G002452/1.
• Co-creating service design for reablement: Thanks to Ardmonagh Family and Community
Group, Engage with Age, Volunteer Now, Oasis Caring in Action, and Shopmobility Belfast
for their enthusiasm and participation, Invest NI Innovation Voucher programme for their
financial support in this project, and to Age NI, Bryson Care and Belfast Health & Social
Care Trust for their farsightedness. Special thanks to Farset Labs for running the
hackathons.
• Co-designing social prescriptions services to support people with long-term conditions: The
authors wish to recognise the support of Invest NI’s Innovation Voucher programme. Many
thanks to Design at Magee year 2 students and also to Mark Cullen and Padraic Lynch from
the University of Ulster’s design team who helped design and run the workshops. Students
were supervised by module co-ordinator and design lecturer Terry Quigley from the
University of Ulster.
Acknowledgements