Award Title: The future of older people's housing and living arrangements: matching emerging technologies with needs for independent living and care support in a sustainable and systematic 'living lab' approach
Funder: Dunhill Medical Trust

Abstract: This project aims to: 1) understand the needs and desires of older people with different backgrounds regarding their future care, support, and housing and living arrangements; 2) identify emerging technology-enabled products and services that are likely to have an impact on independent living, care support and the living environment for older people with care and support needs, and develop methods to monitor and influence the development of such products and services, and assess their potential added value on a regular basis, using a multi-stakeholder co-design/co-decide approach; 3) develop a “living lab”, a realistic cyber-socio-physical environment in which new solutions and care concepts can be tested and evaluated and adapted to meet people’s needs. The project consists of five work packages, one focusing on management of the project, three addressing the above-mentioned aims, and one focusing on dissemination and sustainability. WP1 includes all project management activities. In WP2 we will identify and analyse the needs and aspirations of current clients of Johnnie Johnson Housing/Astraline (JJH/A) and clients on their waiting lists. In addition, we will assess the needs/aspirations of communities who currently do not use or have access to such services, whether that be for economic or cultural reasons. We will endeavour to understand how new technologies can be tools for enabling greater inclusivity. We will conduct surveys and in-depth interviews with people drawn from each of these three groups. The result will be an overview of what current and potential future clients find important in terms of housing arrangements and technological support. WP3 will focus on identifying emerging products and services that may have an impact on care, support and housing for older people, and on developing a systematic, critical methodology to monitor, on an ongoing basis, the development of such products and services and to assess their potential added value. We will develop a method to regularly scan the relevant literature, conferences and exhibitions. To assess the potential added value of new products and services, we will develop a set of key criteria that are important for decisions about their introduction, starting with the set of technical criteria JJH/A currently uses for such decisions, augmented with aspects like expected added value, cost-benefit, safety and security, user acceptance, usability, the risk of increasing inequalities, etc. As a third element of this WP we will, together with older people, informal carers, care professionals, housing and health and social care organisations, technology suppliers and other relevant stakeholders, design a co-decision process for assessing the potential of new products and services. In WP4 we develop a “living lab” with JJH/A in which new products and care concepts can be tested/evaluated. Living labs are user-centred ecosystems whereby innovations can be developed and tested in an open and inclusive manner. In this case, the core of this living lab will be a panel of actual clients of JJH/A who are willing to experiment with new products in their own homes. For the evaluation of these new products and services a standardised toolkit with assessment criteria and procedures, linked to the criteria used in WP2, will be developed. Products and services that ‘pass the test’ of the process designed in WP3 will be evaluated in this living lab. As part of this initiative a junior researcher will live in one of the housing facilities as an ‘embedded researcher’. Under appropriate conditions, this living lab will be made available to external parties who would seek to better understand their users and their environments through co-design processes or who wish to have their products and services evaluated in real settings. In WP5 the results of this project will be disseminated. They will directly feed into the work and strategy of JJH/A but will also be made available to other organisations. Findings will be published in a series of scientific publications, including a PhD thesis, and industry publications within the housing, health and care sectors. In addition, we well develop and implement a sustainable and equitable exploitation model for the living lab and assessment methodologies. The ultimate aim of the project is to develop mechanisms to respond to changing care needs and to exploit technical opportunities to meet these needs.

Lay Abstract: New technologies, and the products and services they enable, hold the promise of improving the care provided to older people, in terms of both its quality and its coverage. However, technical innovation is difficult: most new products/services fail, even when the underlying idea is sound. A chief cause of failure is a lack of understanding of the real needs, wishes and capabilities of target users: new products/services developed in the R&D lab tend not to survive contact with the complexity of people’s everyday lives. This represents a waste of the time, effort and resources as well as a missed opportunity to improve lives. The solution to this problem is, on the face of it, obvious: include end users, and anyone else with an interest, in development, and at as early a stage as possible. In practice, however, this is not as easy as it sounds. Engaging and involving users can be difficult and costly, requiring particular skills and resources and raising ethical concerns, especially when the primary users – the recipients of care – can be ill or vulnerable, and there is a variety of secondary users and interested parties: family, friends and informal carers, health and care professionals, housing providers, care commissioners, and so on.
In this project we propose to address this challenge by developing a “living lab” and complementary methods to guide development and testing of new products/services. In contrast to the sterile, closed environment of the R&D lab, a living lab is composed of real people – all potential users of the technology – living their lives in their own homes and places of work and leisure, who participate in all stages of the innovation process to help develop practical solutions to meet their real needs and aspirations. In this way, products/services are developed in an open and inclusive manner with the active input of users. We will develop, with the participants, acceptable methods to identify and appraise promising emerging technologies and candidate products/services in a systematic way. The results of these appraisals will guide selection and purchase decisions, and steer development and support investment. Because this is valuable information, we believe that the living lab can become economically self-sufficient, with an equitable distribution of surplus income. Furthermore, since by its very nature this approach strives to be inclusive, we see it as a means for including those currently excluded or marginalised by existing care provision.

Research Activity Codes: 7.1 INDIVIDUAL CARE NEEDS;8.1 ORGANISATION AND DELIVERY OF SERVICES
Health Categories: GENERIC HEALTH RELEVANCE