Researchers from the University of Stirling, in collaboration with researchers from Universities of Bristol, Newcastle, Northumbria, Hertfordshire, King’s College London (KCL), London School of Economics & Political Science (LSE), and The Open University (OU) will investigate the current landscape of digital care technologies for social connection, care, and support of older people in the UK. The project is led by Dr Grant Gibson at the University of Stirling and involves Dr Matthew Lariviere (Northumbria), Dr Nicole Steils (KCL), Dr Catherine Henderson (LSE), Professor Katie Brittain (Newcastle), Dr Carolyn Wilson-Nash (CRISP researcher at Stirling), Dr Jennifer Lynch (Hertfordshire), Dr Joanna Thorn (Bristol), Dr Jo Worthington (Bristol), Ms Katie Pike (Bristol), Dr Hannah Martson (The OU), and Mr Raj Mehta (PPI Rep).

Despite significant investment, current evidence suggests that social care services delivering digital care technologies for older adults with assisted living needs are failing to meet their potential. At the same time an increasingly diverse range of technologies are entering the market with the potential to deliver innovative, effective, cost effective, and scalable social care services. However, we do not yet have a clear sense of what new technologies are being used by social care services, or if the people they are being offered to want to use them. The project therefore aims to:

• Identify and select novel digital care technologies for community dwelling older adults with assisted living needs.
• Identify current evidence for the selected novel digital care technologies and using this evidence, co-produce a set of outcome measures appropriate to social care research.
• Co-create with older people using digital care services, an embedded, mixed methods evaluation methodology, including quantitative, qualitative, and economic assessment appropriate to social care, which can be used to assess the effectiveness of the identified novel digital care technologies.

The project is funded by the National Institute for Health and Care Research (NIHR) for the Health Technology Assessment (HTA) Programme. It intends to create a set of core outcomes and tools to support local evaluations of novel digital care services in social care. As accelerator funding, the team will also co-produce a high-quality application for the NIHR HTA Social Care Technologies Assessment call 2024.

Further details about the project can be found here.

For further information please contact Dr Grant Gibson (grant.gibson@stir.ac.uk) or Dr Dr Carolyn Wilson-Nash (carolyn.wilson@stir.ac.uk).