Abstract

With the advancement of medical technologies and low birth rates, the world’s elderly population has risen sharply, and the aging society has increased more and more medical demand. Thus, how to provide a quality home care service is critical. To provide quality care, understanding the needs of the service system’s users is an important step. This research aims to identify the gaps in service needs as expected between two types of system users – caregivers and recipients. The Internet of things (IoT) based smart-bed system developed by H Company was adopted as the research object. Caregivers and recipients were asked to fill in an analytic-hierarchy-process (AHP) questionnaire to rank the importance of smart-bed system functions. In current stage, this study finds that caregivers and recipients consider the forewarning function the most important. For care recipients, functions related to physical sensations (e.g., data analysis on detailed sleeping behaviors) are more important. While for caregivers, functions that can improve their work efficiency and quality (e.g., customized data reporting) are more important. While caregivers concern more about how to complete their tasks, care recipients value more on safety and comfort of the system. Future research can study the importance of service functions and the reasons causing the gaps in order to provide valuable suggestions for IoT companies to improve their future services development and product marketing.

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