Methods for the evaluation of technology-based care solutions for elderly people living at home

On 4 April 2012, MADoPA organised an international seminar on “Methods for the evaluation of technology-based care solutions for elderly people living at home” at the premises of MGEN (a mutual sector healthcare and social protection service provider) in Paris.

During the morning session, Hervé Michel, Director of MADoPA, set the context of the seminar’s theme, highlighting the two main trends shaping the scope of evaluation of acceptance and use: a/ psycho-ergonomic methods aimed at predicting acceptability (before introduction of the technology) and acceptance (after introduction of the technology) by users, and b/ socio-ethnographic methods that aim to examine the acceptability, acceptance and use of technologies by incorporating evaluation thereof into an all-round perspective and co-design approach to evaluation with users.

To illustrate methods for the evaluation of acceptance and use, Vanessa Evers from the University of Twente began by presenting a questionnaire for evaluating the acceptability of robotic solutions – the Almere Model – which runs along the same lines as the Technology Acceptance Model. Tomas Sanchez from the Open University of Catalonia then gave a presentation on ethnographical methods for evaluating non-acceptance and resistance to the use of telecare. Lastly, Céline Verchère, from the CEA Leti, presented a series of user-centric sociological evaluation methods (CAUTIC® method).

In the afternoon, the issue of evaluation methods was cross-examined from an ethical viewpoint, by Jean Philippe Cobbaut from the Catholic University of Lille on the basis of an all-round evaluation method: the GEMSA grid presented by Myriam Le Goff from Telecom Bretagne, a multi-criteria grid incorporating not only medical and economic aspects but also strategic-, organisational- and acceptance and use-type questions.

Finally, using the example of the Health Living Lab, Ben Kröse from the University of Amsterdam showed the links between the co-design methods at work in the Living Labs and the evaluation methods in terms of co-design, which also place the user at the heart of technology-based projects.