Door mijn ogen

Abstract

Frail elderly have an increased risk to get involved with care. Shared decision making can help ensure that this care contributes to the elderly´s quality of life, instead of only extending life. To enable shared decision making, clear communication between the elderly and care professionals is needed, however, this communication is especially difficult for frail elderly. Therefore, it is useful to prepare these elderly for potential care decisions and help them to express themselves, in order to only provide them with care that actually contributes to their quality of life. The aim of this project is:“To design a tool for the frail elderly to help them timely express their desired quality of life, so that care can contribute to their actual quality of life.”In this research, explorative research in the form of interviews, observations and design interventions, is used to form understanding in the problem and define design guidelines for the final design.The desired quality of life is defined as what someone desires to do, whereas actual quality of life addresses their abilities. The research helped to understand desired quality of life from the perspective of the frail elderly and define it as a combination of their current happiness, and their beliefs, which together form their wishes. For these elderly expressing their desired quality of life without aid is difficult, particularly because they perceive their future as limited and existing methods focus mainly on the negative aspects of their future. This unintended negativity is what inspired the vision to start communication with the frail elderly, when they are still relatively autonomous, and support them in portraying their desired quality of life in a tangible manner. This results in the following design goal:“Spark a socially frail visitor to collect & create their own Quality of life Portrait together with a meeting center employee, so the visitor can reflect upon their desired quality of life & share their wishes with others in order to treasure them together for the future.”The design goal also presents five conversation elements: Spark, Reflect, Collect, Create and Share.Nine design guidelines give insight in how to achieve these conversation elements and design for the conversation’s interaction, content and tool. Throughout the conversation, the desired interaction qualities are: trustful, encouraging and invigorating.The final design ‘Door mijn ogen’ is a conversation package that contains instructions for the care professional and a booklet for the frail elderly. Thereby the tool helps the caregiver to prepare for their role as listener and encourages the elderly to become the narrator and writer of their desired quality of life story. The vision and design brief are as relevant as the conversation tool, and hold the potential to inspire further design and research. This project shows a way to help the frail elderly express their desired quality of life in order to improve their actual quality of life by preparing them for personalized care decisions.