Providing Awareness of Elder's Situations of Care through a Context-Aware Notification Environment: A Preliminary Evaluation

Taking care of an elder with cognitive decline is not an easy task. Given their condition, elders could be involved in situations that may affect their physical integrity or quality of life, and caregivers may be unaware of the situation or not be able to attend it on time. This paper proposes a context-aware notification environment to support the work of caregivers. The aim is to increase the caregiver’s awareness about the situations of care of older people in a nursing home, so that caregivers could act appropriately and timely to attend those situations. Firstly, we present the results of a study to understand the situations of care that occur at a nursing home. Later, we propose the design of a context-aware notification environment whose design was informed by this understanding. One of the main features of this environment is that it takes into consideration the contextual information both from the caregiver and from the elder in order to adapt the notification. Preliminary results of the evaluation of an implementation with an audio notification mechanism are promising. During the evaluation period caregivers perceived an increase in their awareness of the situations of care and a safer working environment regarding the provided quality of care.