About The DIALOGUE Project
DIALOGUE: Digital care technologies for social connection, care and support of older adults.
Social care services are increasingly using digital technologies to help older people living at home who might need help from services to live independently. As technologies advance, more and more social care services are looking at using new technologies such as mobile phones, tablets, apps, smart speakers, new forms of artificial intelligence software and social robots in their services. Examples include using technology to help people who might be lonely connect socially with family or friends, to help older people live independently at home, or return home from hospital sooner. Importantly, when compared to existing services, these technologies might be easier for people to use and be preferable to what is usually offered, while also being cheaper for social care services to provide.
However, we don’t have a clear sense of what new technologies are being tried by social care services, or if the people they are being offered to want to use them. We also do not know if social care services will need to change how they work to make best use of these technologies.
Finally we need to know how much they cost and whether they are ‘better’ than their usual activities. Addressing these gaps in our knowledge will help us determine whether and which of these technologies should be offered by all social care services.
Employing Co-production and working together with older people with lived experience of using social care as equal partners will aid us to make decisions about what to include in the project:
- We will work with three groups of a range of older people with diverse experiences of using social care services in the North East, South West, and Central and Eastern areas of England. Each group will have six people, who will work with us to explore if and how technology helps them (or not) in their daily lives.
- Together we will decide which technologies we are most interested in and which groups of older people using technologies provided by social care services we should focus on. We will also decide what research methods to include in the project (e.g. surveys, interviews) and how we will decide if technologies are value for money.
- To support our work, we will also collect information from social services about the range of technologies being offered and send a series of three online surveys to staff in social care services asking them to decide what are the most important priorities for their services.
- We will also collect data from two services which use technology to help older people being discharged from hospital. Working with the three co-production groups, we will then use this information to decide together what data and methods we will need to use in the larger project.
Institutional Partners:
