User Needs for Development of Context Dependent Devices in Mobile Home Care

Mobile work situations within home care of the elderly require immediate and ubiquitous access to patient-oriented data. We intend to develop a mobile information system that provides correct information in a proper way to the right person in the appropriate occasion of care. This requires a thorough user needs analysis that so far often has been neglected during systems development in health care. We conducted the user needs analysis in interdisciplinary working groups in order to achieve a holistic view of the entire work process. This allows for the development of not only patient-oriented but care process oriented systems. In this paper, we describe how the user needs analysis was conducted, the impact of this work on the user group and some of the requirements found to be specific for mobile IT-support for home care of the elderly.