Identifying user requirements of wearable healthcare technologies for Chinese ageing population: Fid-Bau Portal

Identifying user requirements of wearable healthcare technologies for Chinese ageing population

Peng, Guochao / Garcia, Liliana M Sepulveda / Nunes, Miguel / Zhang, Ning

China, like many other developed and developing countries in the world, is facing a rapid ageing population. This phenomenon has led to profound impacts on China's national health and welfare system, social stability, economic development, and productivity, and so is forcing the country to adopt new innovative, resourceful and reliable means to offer better health and caring services to the elderly people. Wearable technologies have the potential to aid this struggle, but there is currently very limited understanding on Chinese old people's requirements for using these technologies. Such misunderstanding can lead to severe mismatch between wearable functions and actual user needs, and so minimize the potential and usefulness of wearable technologies. Therefore, this paper aims to address this knowledge gap by reporting on an exploratory study that investigated Chinese older people's user requirements towards wearable healthcare devices. Five focus groups were conducted to collect insights and opinions respectively from five Chinese families. Each family participated in the focus group contained at least 1–2 elderly member, together with 2–4 family members who held caring responsibilities. The thematic analysis approach was used to analyse the collected qualitative data. The results showed that user requirements of Chinese elderly people contained three main categories, namely healthcare, data privacy and security, and commodity and entertainment needs. The paper concluded that these identified user requirements should be carefully considered by wearable hardware designers, system developers, and service providers if they want their innovative products and services to be accepted by the intended users in the Chinese market.