Making use of data generated by welfare technologies - for safety and efficiency in elderly care

The development and use of welfare technologies in elderly care are recognized to hold great potential to increase safety and efficiency.

European countries face many challenges related to the increased number of older adults in the population and lack of resources putting existing care systems at risk. To meet these challenges governments have pushed digitalization in elderly care. As a result, welfare technologies (WT) are now implemented and in use, generating vast amounts of data.

Taking good care of the data from WT can be understood as the next phase in the development.Care practices experiences that implemented WT solutions only support simple data-analysis and visualization with varying quality. The level of analysis is often decided by the vendors and in some cases the data cannot be accessed at all.

Data from different WT are incompatible which makes it hard to integrate, analyze and visualize data from different systems to support the practice.

Analyzing WT-generated data with the medication and care support system could be beneficial for the elderly and their families, care staff, and managers.

Especially if analysis would be adjusted for stakeholders’ needs and visualized on both individual and organizational level.

Our professional collaboration partners in the care institutions suggest that the use of WT-generated data can be more individually adjusted and more proactive.

As Sweden is one of the world´s most digitally advanced countries and one of the advanced countries in developing and using welfare technology, conducting this study in Sweden has good potential to contribute to research and practice in this field of knowledge.The planning project will be conducted with an action research approach aiming to generate fruitful knowledge to both the collaboration practice and to research.

The planning project will investigate WT-generated data and identify stakeholder’s information needs and challenges related to the use of WT-generated data.