Towards the development of a personalized healthcare solution for elderly: from user needs to system specifications

Due to the demographic changes, the demand for care services adapted to the elderly will have an unprecedented growth globally. In this situation, maintaining quality of life (QoL) and wellbeing for older adults will need support of complementary, nontraditional, ICT-based care practices. vINCI project, part of the European research effort in this domain, aims to deliver an integrated technology for the monitoring and instrumentation of the QoL intervention for older adults. The process of designing the vINCI application is based on the patient profile model that will be the input to provide personalized healthcare. The profile is used as evidence to evaluate the impact of vINCI solution on the perceived quality of life provided by caregivers. This paper proposes a complementary approach in modelling the user profile by identifying the needs and preferences of elderly and translating them into development requirements of the vINCI monitoring platform. In this respect, this paper proposes a methodology and methods to define user needs, which are based upon the User Centered Design principles, such as user surveys. The needs survey provides information that is used to specify the needed functional and nonfunctional requirements that vINCI platform must support.