A Smart Home System for Information Sharing, Health Assessments, and Medication Self-Management for Older People: Protocol for a Mixed-Methods Study

BACKGROUND: Older adults often want to stay in a familiar place, such as their home, as they get older. This so-called aging in place, which may involve support from relatives or care professionals, can promote older people’s independence and well-being. The combination of aging and disease, however, can lead to complex medication regimes and difficulties for care providers in correctly assessing the older person's health. In addition, the organization of health care is fragmented, which makes it difficult for health professionals to encourage older people to participate in their own care. It is also a challenge to perform adequate health assessments and to engage in appropriate communication between health care professionals. OBJECTIVE: The purpose of this paper is to describe the design for an integrated home-based system that can acquire and compile health-related evidence for guidance and information-sharing among care providers and care receivers in order to support and promote medication self-management among older people. METHODS: The authors used a participatory design approach for this mixed-methods project, which was divided into four phases. Phase I, Conceptualization, consists of the conceptualization of a system to support medication self-management, objective health assessments, and communication between health care professionals. Phase II, Development of a System, consists of building and bringing together the conceptualized systems from Phase I. Phase III, Pilot Study, and Phase IV, Full-Scale Intervention, are described briefly. RESULTS: Participants in Phase I were people who were involved in some way in the care of older adults and included older adults themselves, relatives of older adults, care professionals, and industrial partners. With input from Phase I participants, we identified two relevant concepts for promoting medication self-management, both of which related to systems that participants believed could provide guidance for the older adults themselves, relatives of older adults, and care professionals. The systems will also encourage information-sharing between care providers and care receivers. The first is the concept of the Intelligent Age-Friendly Home (IAFH), defined as an integrated residential system that evolves to sense, reason, and act in response to individuals’ needs, preferences, and behaviors as these change over time. The second concept is the Medication safety, Objective assessments of health-related behaviors, and Personalized medication reminders (MedOP) system, a system that would be supported by the IAFH, and which consists of three related components: one that assesses health behaviors, another that communicates health data, and a third that promotes medication self-management. CONCLUSIONS: The participants in this project were older adults, relatives of older adults, care professionals, and our industrial partners. With input from the participants, we identified two main concepts that could comprise a system for health assessment, communication, and medication self-management: the IAFH and the MedOP system. These concepts will be tested in this study to determine whether they can facilitate and promote medication self-management among older people. INTERNATIONAL REGISTERED REPORT IDENTIFIER (IRRID): DERR1-10.2196/12447