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Top1. Introduction
The civil society has a common desire to prolong the period of independent living for elderly citizens (Prigerson, 2003), especially when they are unable to share the living arrangements with their family members. ICT technologies and unobtrusive in-home sensing technologies can maintain health and independence of older adults contributing to the ‘stay independent’ solution (Hyysalo, 2004; Stroetman, 2007). But although in-home monitoring technology can increase safety, independence and quality of life of elderly people, the adoption rates of such advancements are still low.
What it seems to be the gap between the technological and research advancements and the needs of the elderly people is the practicality of the proposed solutions where the monitoring technology must be non-intrusive and not interfere with daily living activities (Wild et al., 2008).
Following the above, the design of a desirable and practical unobtrusive monitoring system seems to be a complex task which should be based on realistic capabilities, costs, risks and benefits in order to address the health and functional needs of older adults in an ethically responsible way.
This paper describes the design, development and deployment of a novel unobtrusive low-cost ICT system based on off-the-shelf open platforms to support independent living of the elderly citizens as long as possible in their home. The end users that the USEFIL system is designed for are males and females at an age 65+ years old, with age related disabilities.
The Design Science Research Methodology (DSRM) has been followed in this work (Peffers et al. 2007; Hevner et al. 2004). We adopted the DSRM because it provides a framework that is well suited to the creation of artefacts in the Information Systems arena since it directly addresses the core role of the IT artifact as the IS discipline (Orlikowski and Iacono 2001; Benbasat and Zmud 2003). Although some good quality recent work has been released following this framework (Parsons et al. 2011; Matos et al. 2013; Bapna et al. 2013) and design science has been well defined, theorized, and actualized in the IS field (Iivari 1991; Nunamaker et al. 1991, Walls et al. 1992; March and Smith 1995) still scholars face confusion and misunderstanding of DSRMs’ central ideas and goals Gregor and Hevner (2013). We hope that this paper will help in the direction of promotion of DSRM as a very well-constructed method to validate the design and the actual deployment of the IT solutions and artifacts.
The rest of the paper is structured following the main activities of the DSRM methodology. Section 2 reports on the problem identification and motivation and presents the definition of the objectives for a solution, Section 3 describes the design and development, Section 4 discusses the demonstration and evaluation and Section 5 concludes the activity of Communication which is, partly happening in the writing of this paper. Finally Section 6 discusses and concludes the paper.