Service Tailoring: A Method and Tool for User-centric Creation of Integrated IT-based Homecare Services to Support Independent Living of Elderly

This thesis addresses the problem of supporting independent living of elderly people through IT-based homecare services. Independent living is seen as one way to deal with the consequences of an aging population (especially in industrialized countries), which include rising healthcare expenditures and a required shortage of healthcare professionals. Our main goal is to improve the service creation process for the homecare domain, in terms of reducing the IT skills, time, and effort needed to create new services, while aligning the individual needs of service users and the functionality of the created services. We call our approach to service creation "service tailoring". Service tailoring, as proposed in this thesis, is a way of creating new services, and adapting previously created services, involving healthcare professionals (care-givers) in the creation process and targeting elderly people (carereceivers) as the primary users of the created services. For requirements engineering, we started with a literature study of existing homecare systems and user-centric service personalization techniques, and a market survey of current homecare technologies and products. Then, we performed five series of interviews with caregivers in a care institution in the Netherlands1. This institution consists of residential blocks where elderly persons can live and receive care services round the clock from professional care-givers. The first, second, and third series of interviews were done before prototyping our approach, and the fourth and fifth series of interviews were performed to check the usability of the approach after the prototype was used by the care-givers and care-receivers. We performed the first series of interviews by using questionnaires to analyze the existing situation and to learn what types of services were expected from an IT-based homecare system. These interviews were helpful to gain insight into commonly performed tasks and how these tasks are performed. After designing our approach, we performed the second series of interview with the same care-givers to validate our design and refine it before implementing a prototype of our approach. 1http://www.orbisconcern.nl/