Towards Lifestyle-Oriented and Personalised E-Services for Elderly Care

Abstract

Owing to demographic changes towards an increasing elderly population, research efforts have focused on exploring new service models aimed to ensure increased active and quality health and social life for the elderly. However, existing approaches often treat the elderly as compliant individuals, and deliver services through a series of discrete care episodes that hardly take account of the varied needs and lifestyles of the elderly, nor connect to the social networks, things and places around which the elderly have progressively built their lives. This position paper proposes to investigate the concept of personal lifestyle as an approach for informing the design of personalised e-services for elderly care. The goal is to identify the unmet needs and preferences of the elderly, and consequently develop lifestyle-oriented personalised active ageing e-services that take account of their usual habits, preconditions, preferences and circumstances in the provisioning of healthcare services to support independent living.