Page 254 - Handbook of Electronic Assistive Technology

Chapter 8 • Assisted Living 243

developing such living environments present significant challenges to carers for the fol-
lowing reasons:
1� Many of these individuals will have had no previous experience of living in their own
tenancies and they will take time to acclimatise to their environment and newfound
independence, making it difficult to predict their general behaviour patterns. This will
also be influenced by the relationships that they establish with their various care givers.
2� Their behaviour patterns will alter over time, as they start to utilise the confidence and
new skills that they develop. They may flourish in unpredictable and surprising ways.
3� Some individuals with challenging behaviour will remain difficult to manage,
and although they may appear to acclimatise well initially, they will adapt their
behaviour to maximise the control of their situation, once the care patterns have
been established and they are familiar with the regime; the end of the so-called
‘honeymoon period’ (Campbell and McCue, 2012).
4� Carers are likely to be cross-supporting the clients and each other from within a
fixed staff pool, and may have different protocols for how they respond to differing
scenarios for each individual. These protocols may also vary depending on the general
mood and status of individual clients.

In these circumstances, technologies that primarily support the carers in caring for their
clients are beneficial and might be considered necessary. Clearly, the flexibility and adaptabil-
ity of layout discussed earlier will help ensure that the appropriate information is available,
but the key to success is flexibility in configuring the management of the information and
in making it available to carers in an appropriate form. There are three main aspects to this:
1� A flexible, user-friendly method for defining and setting alerts that trigger a response.
This means that they must not only be easy to physically set, but also that their
context is easily understood, so that they can be aligned effectively with the protocols
for care provision and the agreed responses to situations that real carers will actually
have to perform.
2� An intuitive user-friendly interface to communicate the information for decision-
making in a rapid and intuitive manner. When multiple scenarios arise at the same time
there will generally not be enough staff to deal with them all simultaneously. Therefore
swift judgements will have to be made about how to respond. The less cognitive load
that the alert management system places on the carers, the better placed they are to
make effective decisions. This has a potentially important knock-on effect of reducing
the general stress levels that such staff has to work under, which has both health and
safety implications and economic implications associated with staff sickness; and
possibly more importantly in terms of continuity of care is its effect on staff retention.
3� Efficient restructuring of alerting profiles to meet changing needs, especially
unexpected change.

These are the key factors behind the design of the system for the Tayside LD projects.
The technology required to achieve these goals may be applicable in other situations where