Purpose: An ageing population presents a challenge for municipal eldercare in Sweden due to difficulties recruiting staff and there being a strained economy. A strategy involving welfare technology is presented as one such solution. An important group to carry out this strategy involves those who work with welfare technology in municipal eldercare. In this paper we describe their perception of welfare technology, and the challenges and opportunities they perceive in utilizing it. Methods: A self-administered online questionnaire was distributed to all Swedish municipalities and answered by 393 respondents. Analyses show that the respondents were representative of the different professions who work with welfare technology within municipal eldercare. Results: Welfare technology was perceived as being more reliable and safer than humans with regards to supervisions and reminders. The respondents acknowledged factors that slowed down the implementation of welfare technology in municipal eldercare organizations, such as resistance to change, lack of finances, lack of supporting evidence, lack of infrastructure, high staff turnover, difficulties with procurement and uncertainties about responsibility and laws. Conclusions: We found that the people who work with and make decisions about welfare technology in municipal eldercare organizations were generally very positive about the deployment and use of such technology, but there appear to be problems within municipal eldercare organizations to realize this vision. The lack of structured implementation processes and coherent evaluation models indicates inequality of the access to welfare technology and, as a result, even though Swedish eldercare is publicly funded, the availability of welfare technologies and their usage differ between municipalities. ä IMPLICATIONS FOR REHABILITATION The research findings show that implementing welfare technologies in municipal eldercare must include transformed working processes and long-term strategies or they may lead to conflicts of priorities or unstructured implementation processes. Structured implementation processes and coherent evaluation models are needed for equality of access and availability of welfare technologies in municipal eldercare. High staff turnover negatively affects the deployment of welfare technology and the root cause of high staff turnover needs to be addressed.
Introduction: Swedish municipalities face a number of daunting challenges; an aging population, the public's increased demands and expectations on municipality services, and a strained economy to mention some. Welfare technology, a Scandinavian concept launched to promote digitalization, is seen as one solution to meet these challenges. Objective: Despite these promises, few welfare technology applications are offered by local Swedish municipalities and care organizations. Numerous studies have shown that Swedish municipalities have a great interest in welfare technologies. Methods: In this article, we draw on empirical research in one Swedish municipality. Through two case studies it is illustrated how technological change and municipality employment of welfare technologies are employed. Results: These case studies show how core values of care are being lost in the quest for digitalization due to the lack of organizational skills and knowledge in transforming the relationship of caregiving and care-receiving through the use of digital technology. Conclusions: Digitalization and welfare technologies deployed ought to represent and support the core values of caregiving and to receive care. Thus, digital transformation most likely will transform conditions for care receivers and working conditions for care workers. New work processes will evolve, which in turn produce new meanings of home help service work and caregiving.
ä IMPLICATIONS FOR REHABILITATIONDigitalization and the use of new digital technologies imply changes in care value creation. New digital activities deviate from classic caregiving, which in turn can offer opportunities to expand and enrich the experience of receiving care but it can also have negative effects on the received care if incorrectly employed. Digitalization must be regarded as an evolutionary process, in which mistakes and failures are allowed and corrected. Long-term strategies, infrastructure, clear goals and commitments are key for successful digitalization of eldercare.
We present the robot developed within the Hobbit project, a socially assistive service robot aiming at the challenge of enabling prolonged independent living of elderly people in their own homes. We present the second prototype (Hobbit PT2) in terms of hardware and functionality improvements following first user studies. Our main contribution lies within the description of all components developed within the Hobbit project, leading to autonomous operation of 371 days during field trials in Austria, Greece, and Sweden. In these field trials, we studied how 18 elderly users (aged 75 years and older) lived with the autonomously interacting service robot over multiple weeks. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first time a multifunctional, low-cost service robot equipped with a manipulator was studied and evaluated for several weeks under real-world conditions. We show that Hobbit’s adaptive approach towards the user increasingly eased the interaction between the users and Hobbit. We provide lessons learned regarding the need for adaptive behavior coordination, support during emergency situations, and clear communication of robotic actions and their consequences for fellow researchers who are developing an autonomous, low-cost service robot designed to interact with their users in domestic contexts. Our trials show the necessity to move out into actual user homes, as only there can we encounter issues such as misinterpretation of actions during unscripted human-robot interaction.
The current paper addresses the implications of doing research on socially assistive robots in real homes. In contrast to laboratory studies, studies of robots in their intended natural environments can provide insights into people's experiences of robots, and if and how a robot becomes embedded and used in people's everyday life. However, moving robots out of the lab and into real life environments poses several challenges. Laboratory methods mainly focus on cause-and-effect relations between independent and dependent variables, while researchers who are conducting studies in real homes have much less control. In home trials, researchers need to decide what kind of data is obtainable and available. In real homes, researchers face unique challenges that require unique and pragmatic approaches. Any single study conducted in a real home is likely to have methodological limitations. Therefore, several different studies using different robots and methods are needed before the results can be converged in order to reach conclusions that are convincingly supported. This paper is an effort to provide such a report on a specific empirical case and converging findings from other studies. The goal is to provide an account of the research challenges and opportunities encountered when introducing a robot into its intended practice: the homes of older people. The aim is to give enough details for other
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