TELLAB data collection complete!

TELLAB project reaches data collection milestone

The TELLAB project has reached a milestone this autumn with the completion of its data collection activities. Through focus groups and questionnaires, we have collected the opinions of older people (aged 55 and over) about digital technologies, about technology-enabled care services and about the areas of everyday life that present difficulties. This information will be used to guide our activities in a “living lab” we are establishing with older people and in collaboration with project partners Johnnie Johnson Housing and Astraline. The lab will help co-develop and evaluate technology-enabled care services that help people live well and independently for longer. To ensure that we heard from representative sample of older people, we adopted a hybrid data collection strategy: alongside conventional face-to-face data collection in residential schemes and online questionnaires, we’ve conducted focus groups in different languages (sometimes several at once!) and engaged Community Research Link Workers, members of local, underserved communities, to administer questionnaires on our behalf. This last activity has been coordinated with the help of the Deep End Research Alliance, an initiative for improving the inclusion of underserved populations in care research across the Yorkshire and Humber region.

The TECS evidence gap

Digital technology-enabled care services (TECS) could play a vital role in helping us all to live independently and well for longer, as well as helping to fill gaps in care provision for an ageing population. However, uptake to date has been, at best, patchy. One reason for this is that many available TECS have been developed for older people rather than with them, and so are based on mistaken assumptions about the needs, wants and abilities of older people. Moreover, even when potentially valuable TECS exist, a lack of rigorous evaluation means that there is little evidence to support adoption (and financial outlay) by individuals or by housing and care providers.

TELLAB living lab

The aim of the Technology-Enabled Living Lab for Ageing Better (TELLAB) is to address some of the issues around the development and evaluation of TECS through establishing a “living lab” with older residents of project partner Johnnie Johnson Housing’s independent-living housing schemes. A living lab is a structured environment for collaborative innovation that puts new technologies and techniques into real-world situations, allowing them to be used and evaluated over extended periods. TELLAB allows researchers, technology developers and service providers to work with older people to develop and test TECS at various stages of maturity, from ideation and conceptual design work through to market-ready product evaluation.

Evidence collection

However, in order to develop the criteria used to guide the lab activities, to focus on what is important for older people, what they want and what will make a real difference to their lives, and to select the sort of TECS that lab activities should consider, we need a body of evidence about the needs and wants of older people. To this end, we conduct a series of focus groups, some with Johnnie Johnson residents and others with members of local communities that are considered to be underserved by conventional health, care and housing services, and whose voice is “seldom heard” in policy, consultation and research activities. The results of these focus groups have helped us to develop a questionnaire with which to collect a more extensive set of data. We’ve administered this not only with Johnnie Johnson residents (using both online and conventional face-to-face, pen-and-paper methods), but also by engaging the services of Community Research Link Workers (CRLWs), members of local, seldom-heard communities, who agreed to administer the questionnaire on our behalf in those communities. 

Engaging local communities

This collaboration between the University of Sheffield and the communities that neighbour it geographically but often feel far-removed from its activities has been possible only with the assistance of the Deep End Research Alliance, and of Kate Fryer, who is co-lead and project manager at DERA and member of CATCH. This collaboration with the CRLWs has been very successful and paves the way for more inclusive participatory activities, not only within the TELLAB project but also across CATCH and the University more generally.

Mark Hawley & Stephen Potter, CATCH

Kate Fryer, CATCH & Deep End Research Alliance

Links:

TELLAB

Deep End Research Alliance

CATCH