Reflecting on Living Labs as Multi-Stakeholder Collaborative Networks to Evaluate Technological Products for People Living with Dementia.

Dementia is a growing societal challenge putting pressure on care systems across Europe. Providing supporting technology for people living with dementia, referring to both people with dementia and their caregivers, is an important strategy to alleviate pressure. In this paper, we present lessons learned from the Interreg NWE Project Certification-D, in which we evaluated technological products with people living with dementia, using a Living Lab approach. Living Labs were set up in five different countries to conduct field evaluations at the homes of people living with dementia. Via an open call products from small to medium enterprises across northwestern Europe were selected to be evaluated in the Living Labs. In this paper, we describe the setup of and reflection on Living Labs as multi-stakeholder collaboration networks to evaluate technological products in the context of dementia. We reflect on the experiences and insights from the Living Lab researchers to execute and operate the Living Labs in such a sensitive setting. Our findings show that Living Labs can be used to conduct field evaluations of products, that flexibility is required to adopt a Living Lab in various care settings with different stakeholder compositions and expertise, and that Living Lab researchers serve as both a linking pin and buffer between people living with dementia and companies and thereby support the adoption of technological products. We close the paper with a proposal of best practices to encourage inclusivity in, and scalability of, Living Labs in the context of dementia.

Infrastructuring Multicultural Healthcare Information Systems.

This paper stresses the need for more research in the field of Participatory Design (PD) and in particular into how to design Health Information Technology (HIT) together with care providers and -receivers in multicultural settings. We contribute to this research by describing a case study, the 'Health-Cultures' project, in which we designed HIT for the context of home care of older people with a migration background. The Health-Cultures project is located in the city of Genk, Belgium, which is known for its multicultural population, formed by three historical migration waves of people coming to work in the nowadays closed coal mines. Via a PD approach, we studied existing means of dialogue and designed HIT that both care receivers and care providers in Genk can use in their daily exchanges between cultures in home care contexts. In discussing relevant literature as well as the results of this study, we point to the need and the ways of taking spatio-historical aspects of a specific healthcare situation into account in the PD of HIT to support multicultural perspectives on healthcare.

Lessons Learned from Participatory Design in Dementia Care: Placing Care Partners at the Centre.

In this paper we analyze the participatory design (PD) process of a health information technology (HIT) project. This project, AToM was situated in dementia care and involved partners from academia, industry and care. The analysis specifically focuses on the role of the care partners in the PD process. We will show that the conditions to enable 'good participatory design' were not fully met and we present a set of actions to prevent this in future HIT projects. Central to our recommended approach is placing the care partners at the centre of the PD project.