Designing New Dignified Technologies for Care Settings in Participation With Older People.

One of the crucial components of successful ageing is to live independently in old age. Yet in UK alone, nearly 300000 older people require assistance with 3 or more essential daily tasks like eating, bathing and mobility which compromises on their independent living. Additionally, in a crisis where health system in UK is already overstretched to its resources to combat the recent Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic, allocating resources for regular homecare services has become challenging. In this situation, Digital Health Technologies (DHTs) can be a potential solution to promote healthy ageing, support psycho-social wellbeing and enhance independent living for older people. Such technologies comprise a wide range of products used in the health and care services including apps, software and online platforms to benefit people. Yet DHTs are barely adopted by older people as they do not reflect their actual user needs leading to poor appropriation of DHTs in homecare settings. The investigators aim to address this gap by involving older people living at the Leach Court, UK under the eco system of the Brighton \& Hove Digital Health Living Lab (BHLL) to co-design with us DHTs that addresses the barriers \& facilitators they face in adopting to DHTs. This participatory research approach has a qualitative study design which is sensitive to basic human values like 'dignity', appreciates that older people are 'expert of their experiences' and methodologically has phenomenological underpinnings gathering the researcher's understanding from the lived experiences of older people. This unique project, part of the European Union (EU) Horizon 2020 funded INNOVATEDIGNITY project, will be aiming to translate intangible human values like 'dignity' into tangible technology design through better understanding of the barriers \& facilitators older people face to DHTs adoption. With global population of older people increasing faster than all other age groups currently, this project stands to meet the future demands of the ageing population through dignity sensitive better designed DHTs . This project is part of the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA) Innovative Training Networks (ITN). This project has received funding from the European Union's H2020-MSCA-ITN-2018 programme under grant agreement No 813928.