Teleassistance for the elderly at home

Context

In Switzerland, as in other industrialized countries, one of the challenges is to maintain elderly's good health as long as possible. Part of this strategy lays on ensuring that they are quickly and safely helped in the event of a fall or another health-related problem. The goal of ensuring security though have to be balanced with the goal of ensuring that elderly's right to privacy and autonomy

Study design

In this study we submitted to elderly and their proxies within a Think Aloud protocol a range of teleassistance devices in order to investigate their needs, fears and expectations.

Results

Results confirmed that generally elderly value privacy over security. However, such perspective change when they experience a fall or illness that prevent them to seek help.