‘Keep Taking the Medication’: Assistive Technology for Medication Regimes in Care Settings

Abstract

This chapter presents some of the early design work of the ‘Care in the Digital Community’ research project — begun under the EPSRC IRC Network project EQUATOR. One objective of the project is to improve the quality of everyday life by building and adapting technologies for a range of user groups and application domains. Consequently, it is very much concerned with developing supporting technologies based on a comprehensive understanding of user needs. Meeting this objective will require us to address fundamental and long-term research challenges in how computing technologies and concepts relate and adapt to a range of everyday domestic environments, including those characterised as ‘care’ settings. The Digital Care project employs a multidisciplinary research team to facilitate the development of enabling technologies to assist care in the community for particular user groups with different support needs. The general aim is to examine how digital technology can be used to provide various kinds of support to sheltered housing residents and their staff. Although the project anticipates exploring the affordances of a variety of technological configurations, including the use of virtual environments replicating real world situations and the use of handheld and wearable digital technology, the focus of this chapter is on our early work on providing support for the medication regime.