Supporting the dialogue of care

Research in MATCH led to interest in developing ways of enhancing the Dialogue of Care between stakeholders, in particular between carers and those in their care. In order to inform this dialogue, different stakeholders require different information according to their different perspectives on care. This information then needs to be presented to the stakeholders in appropriate levels of detail and granularity through interfaces that are suitable for each stakeholder. This chapter reports on various discrete studies within that overall process. Investigation was conducted into ways of looking for patterns in the life of a person, through modelling of the “busyness” of activity in their dwelling. The use of on-line analytical processing (OLAP) and data mining was interesting in this context because of the possibility of exploring, detecting and predicting changes in the level of activity that might reflect change in personal well-being. An investigation was conducted into the use of business intelligence techniques and visualisation to illustrate activity from sensor data from a trial project run in a domestic context. This was followed by development of a domestic well-being indicator system (DWIS) to present information to stakeholders and a model instrumented house for use as a demonstrator to promote understanding among stakeholders regarding home care technology.