This technical report contains personas based on the authors’ earlier and ongoing research together with literature studies. The original aim of the work presented in this report was to provide the E-care@home research environment with an understanding of who the user of a hypothetical future E-care@home system is. The resulting personas are to be used as a tool to aid other work packages within the E-care@home research environment in their design processes. The project focuses on technological solutions and uses artificial intelligence for creating a semantic interoperability between sensor data, systems and humans. The release of this report is, however, a result of several requests of data and user specifications coming from both researchers and companies, who want to base their work on realistic situations of elderly people.
Several interviews have been performed with potential end users: with healthcare providers within geriatrics care at a hospital, within home care services, and with more-or-less-healthy elderly people, focusing on frail elderly people who may be in risk of falling, developing malnutrition and/or pressure ulcers, and also their closest relatives and their caregivers.
In this report, 15 personas are presented. There are five different elderly personas. Two of them live together with their spouses, one of which is presented as a persona. In addition, the report presents the personas of eight healthcare professionals, all of which are involved in Senior Alert risk assessments and prevention of falls, malnutrition and pressure ulcers. Three personas represent different professions working in the home care services, the other five personas work at a geriatrics hospital ward. Finally, one informal caregiver of an elderly, a daughter, is presented as a persona. These hypothetical and archetypical users shed light on a variety of different users that may interact with an E-care@home system, or other IoT technologies in the future.
It should be acknowledged that the work presented in this technical report has been extracted from one of E-care@home scientific deliverables, MSR5.1b. The original deliverable, that was authored by Mälardalen University, SICS East and Örebro University, features also personas representing elderly multi-morbid users with specialized home healthcare and a number of use cases that pose challenging scenarios that highlight a range of possible interactions with the E-care@home system.
Örebro, Sweden: School of Science and Technology, Örebro University , 2017. , p. 36
Assistive technology, personas, e-health, semantic interoperability, interviews with users