The DIALOGUE Project
DIALOGUE – building person centred, caring communities through technology.
This work brings together academics with interests in social care research and practice, social gerontology, dementia studies, computing science, business and implementation science, with social care professionals and older people using social care services. What unites us is the goal of promoting research and practice which drives forward the person-centred use of technology within social care ensuring these technologies will meet the needs and wants of older people now and in the future as technology evolves.
Our innovative research explores how social care services can effectively develop, implement and use technologies to support older people to live the lives they want to live.
About the Dialogue
Our Vision and Key Principles
Our vision is to drive forward a research agenda for technology enabled social care services that focuses on how older people with assistive living needs actually engage with technology in their lives.
The notion of person-centredness is at the core of our DIALOGUE projects. We want to move the starting point of research on technology and care away from questions of ‘what does a technology do’ or ‘how can it save services time or money?’. Instead, we want to ask questions like ‘what do older people want and need to live life as they want to live it?’ and ‘how can technology help them to live these lives?’.
Rather than seeing technology as a replacement or substitute for human care tasks or activities, our research prioritises approaches to technology enabled care which support social connection and relationship-based care approaches, ultimately enriching the lives of care recipients and the services offered by care providers.
We view independence not as autonomy – the person, alone, supported by technology to enforce autonomy, but as interdependence, facilitated by technologies which enable people to make choices and ultimately to be able to take control over their lives.
By placing the individual and their needs at the centre, we will seek to support the creation of technologies and technology enabled care services that can help people to do what they want to do; what their goals are for life, rather than what are their needs.
Our key principles include:
Technologies and care services should empower, not restrict. Care technology must support personal autonomy and positive risk-taking – enabling individuals to live the lives they choose. Safety monitoring should not be used as a substitute for freedom, choice, or bodily autonomy.
Support without stigma or intrusion. Technologies should be unobtrusive, fit aesthetically into people’s lives, and to not actively stigmatise users. Privacy and consent are not one-time events; they are ongoing conversations about participation.
Tech should enable care relationships; not act as substitutes for them. Digital tools should enable care workers to have more unhurried time for meaningful human connection. Technology must never be deployed as a cost-cutting shortcut to replace essential human contact.
Digital inclusion is a fundamental right. Care technologies will be used by a range of individuals with diverse health and social care needs. Technologies must accommodate diverse cognitive, physical, sensory, and linguistic needs, and adapt to people’s needs as they change. To combat digital exclusion technologies and services should be affordable, intuitive, and most crucially be tailored to fit into individual’s needs.
Measure what matters to the person. Success in digital social care cannot be measured solely by cost savings, measures of efficiency, service utilisation metrics or quantitatively measurable health outcomes. Technologies should also be evaluated according to factors including quality of life, loneliness, self-worth, and personal fulfilment.
Consider impacts of technology on the care whole system, not just its parts. Technologies are never introduced to services, or to people in a vacuum. They are complex interventions, whose success is influenced by a whole set of different factors across the person, the technology, the organisation and the wider care system, as well as changing over time. Without considering these factors, no study can successfully capture the success of a given technology or service on care.
Our Approach to Co-Production
Co-production is the heart of this work. Technologies should not be conceived of or delivered as “top-down” solutions imposed on individuals without consideration of needs, without their active participation and without their guidance.
To understand what older people want from technology and technology enabled care services we need to engage with older people, not as patients or clients, but also not as participants or consultants. We should treat older people as equal partners. This means involving older people who use social care service to create our agenda, and to act as partners in the creation and delivery of technology enabled social care research, and in translating this research into actions that will positively affect older people’s lives.
Co-production is a central part of the projects in our network. Social care service users are co-investigators in our projects, and our existing and completed projects have each involved partnerships with older people who are receiving social care services. More information about these partnerships can be found in the individual projects. All projects include a person living with social care needs as a project partner and project co-investigator, who attends project meetings, participates in project management decisions and contributes to work packages.
Institutional Partners:
