Personalising Domiciliary Dementia Care: Co-Design of an App Matching Care Preferences of Care Workers and People Living with Dementia

The delivery of person-centred dementia care in community settings is undermined by high levels of care worker stress, burnout, and high staff turnover. Improving the experience of domiciliary care for all stakeholders is paramount. Previous research has suggested that matching the skills/characteristics of care workers to the needs and preferences of people with dementia can enhance the quality of domiciliary care. This study aims to personalise domiciliary care through the co-design and development of a novel app-based system that employs machine learning to match the preferences of people living with dementia, their family/friend supporters and care providers, as well as enabling a ‘live’, needs-informed rostering.

The study will consist of three work packages (WPs). WP1: a review summarising evidence on what 'good' domiciliary care is for key stakeholder groups. WP2: eight focus groups with key stakeholder groups of community-dwelling people with dementia, their supporters, and domiciliary care professionals (including care workers and managers of care organisations). WPs 1 and 2 will inform WP3: the iterative co-design of the app, which will involve co-design workshops with representatives from key stakeholder groups, iterative development of the computational elements of the app by a computer science researcher, and development of the app interface, working with web developers. Intersectoral costs and outcomes will be considered throughout the project, which will inform a full economic evaluation in the future. We will document the development process, and use the resulting prototype to pursue additional funding for further development and pilot-testing of the app.