Analogue to Digital Telecare: Findings and Themes from a User-Centred Study to Help People Live in the Community Safely

<p class="first" id="d165906e107">Telecare services include personal alarms, home sensors and activity monitoring to enable people to remain safe and independent in their own home. Telecare has traditionally used analogue connectivity, however internationally, there is a shift to digital connectivity. This presents a rare opportunity to fundamentally redesign telecare, address current barriers to uptake, and help more people live in the community safely. This paper describes a user-centred study to design innovative digital telecare concepts, involving key stakeholders (a supplier, a manufacturer, 13 end users, 32 informal carers and 29 health and social care professionals). There are currently limited examples of digital telecare internationally. The main contributions of this paper are: an overview of key challenges and opportunities for telecare, not emphasised in existing literature within the context of the analogue to digital switchover; findings from user engagement activities, which identified issues that may be more important to users when designing telecare (e.g. self-concept) and less important (e.g. privacy); and the synthesis of ideas generated through the design process, which identified four themes that should prove useful to practitioners and researchers working in the field: community-based support, telecare you don’t wear or notice, expand the use of telecare, and introduce telecare earlier.