A Study On The Quality Evaluation Of Community-based Smart Home Care For Older Adults

ObjectiveIn the context of both the "silver-hair wave" and the "technology wave",smart senior care offer new solutions for aging in place for community-dwelling seniors in China and other countries.However,very few studies have focused on the development of a quality evaluation index system for community-based smart home care.This study attempts to develop an evaluation index system of community-based smart home care by drawing on the SERVQUAL model.Taking Shenzhen as an example,a questionnaire survey is conducted on the current situation of quality evaluation of community-based smart home care in Shenzhen to explore the existing issues and propose tailored solutions in order to benefit the prospective development of community-based smart home care.MethodOn the basis of the service quality model,this paper using Guangzhou and Shenzhen pilot regions as field interview subjects,has integrated qualitative and quantitative analyses using the Delphi and Analytic Hierarchy Process(AHP)methods to construct the index system of smart home care in the community and obtain the weights of each index.The study was performed by a combination of typical sampling and convenience sampling,and face-to-face and telephone interviews were used to investigate in the pilot area of smart senior care in Shenzhen.The fuzzy comprehensive evaluation method was employed to evaluate the quality of community-based smart home care.ResultThe authority coefficients of experts were 0.883 and 0.867 respectively,meaning that the results are reliable and persuasive.The coordination coefficients of the indicators increased from 0.137 to 0.233,showing acceptable consistency.A quality evaluation indexes system of smart home care for older adults in the community was developed,with 5 primary indices and 33 secondary indices.The weights of the 5 stair indices from high to low were smart emergency assistance 0.332,smart meal assistance 0.272,smart medical assistance 0.229,smart cleaning assistance 0.110 and smart amusement assistance 0.057.The evaluation results show that the overall quality of Shenzhen’s community home wisdom elderly care services is relatively satisfactory.Specifically,the overall ratings of the five service contents from high to low were smart amusement assistance,smart medical care assistance,smart emergency assistance,smart cleaning assistance and smart meals assistance.On the whole,although the overall rating is fairly good,there are still shortcomings and further improvements are needed.The research results reflect that the following problems remain in the quality of community-based smart home care in Shenzhen:the entrenched traditional concept of senior care and the inadequacy wisdom of intelligent products;single service content and lack of personalization;insufficient product applicability and unreasonable price sequence;scarce supply of professional staff,insufficient specialization,leading to uneven service quality;lack of feedback and supervision mechanism of smart senior care.ConclusionThe results revealed smart emergency assistance,smart meal assistance,and smart medical care assistance were the most important and crucial aspects of communitybased smart home care.The study also suggested that "timeliness","reliability",and"ease of use" should be given more attention.It is recommended to use this index system as a regulatory benchmark to guide the government bodies,senior care enterprises and communities to take measures to enhance the quality.To address the problem of the quality of community home wisdom elderly service,it should provide targeted countermeasure suggestions to upgrade the quality of community-based smart home care from the perspective of four main parties:the government,society,community and family to achieve positive aging.