Supporting people to age-in-place

Abstract

A key challenge elderly people face is the ability to live independently. Losing their everyday independence is a major concern for the elderly, partly because they fear this could lead to an involuntary move to an assisted living facility instead of living independently. Since 2015, the Dutch government encourages their citizens to age-in-place, but at the same time struggles with how to implement new healthcare regulations. To support both government and citizens, we propose a digital platform to match supply and demand in the health and wellbeing domain. Such a platform should not only enable end-users to enhance self-management, but also support them to find solutions for everyday problems related to aging-in-place. To illustrate our Action Design Research we established a Living Lab in a metropolitan area in the Netherlands, and developed a prototype of the proposed platform in a real-life setting.