In many European projects in the Ageing Well/ Ambient Assisted Living area there is often a tendency to focus more on the users health related disability, instead of focusing on their resources
to cope with the activities of daily life (ADL). To describe a user only by
looking at his specific diagnoses, using tools like IDC-10 and simple
questionnaires about Quality of Life (QoL) is not appropriate to understand the
complexity of their social, physical and mental capabilities.

PERSONA project has selected a holistic user assessment approach. This is vital for a number of reasons. First of all because the general (non expert) view of the elderly person is often seen as a
weak person, without resources (i.e. elderly representation in some road signs,
where drivers apparently should be aware of the wild elderly people with
walking canes running all over the roads). The same view is also common in many
of the technological research and development projects, where the user often is
referred to as a patient instead of a citizen. The “elderly as fragile and
weak” approach could often lead to technological AAL-solutions or services that
easily counter-react to the goals of elderly care. A holistic approach to
describe the user profile is a way to shift focus from the disability-focus
over to the resources focus.

This can be explained considering the everyday preventive interventions in elderly care performed with the (care) goal of either raising or maintaining the functional level of the end user
ability to do some activity (i.e. dressing, shopping, cleaning or visit
friends) instead of being dependent of public or private services. To maintain
the physical capability often requires physical or mental training. Modern AAL
houses are intended to be equipped with technology where every physical
activity (i.e. like closing and opening a window) can be substituted with a
touch on a remote and maybe even voice-activated or performed by service
robots. This can lead to a reduction physical activity level, and the result
could be an increasing need of public or private services, instead of reducing
them as was originally expected. Here the AAL-technology could counter react
the goals of elderly care and rehabilitation. This is why the tools used to
monitor the effects of a technological intervention have to include a holistic
end user centric approach to ensure most aspects of the end users wishes and
needs to maintain and perform their independent lives.

Many future European projects will focus on how to “measure” the impact of the intervention of AAL-technology in the end users life, in order to establish evidence of the investment in AAL-products
feasibility in business cases. A key point to establish this evidence is to
find a simple methodology that can measure improvements or deterioration of
ADL-functions (Activities of Daily Living) over time. This is vital in order to
document the effects of the intervention of AAL-technology in the domain, and
essential for the future growth of a European “AAL-market”

PERSONA project has developed a new user profile methodology and hopefully common European holistic approach for describing end users, either elderly people or people with functional
disabilities. The goal in PERSONA is not to produce evidence based data of each
service capability (e.g. reduce the workload of the care sector in the future,
or to produce reliable data in the trial to monitor changes in ADL over time)
but to develop and evaluate a common European approach to a user assessment methodology.
The research conducted in the field of user assessment and user profiling
throughout Europe and worldwide has resulted in the selection of two essential
and universal tools that are suitable to test as a common methodology: ICF and
SF-36v2.

See the detailed description in the attached files, including my presentation attached.