Members of the research group HFE2H from the left: Dr. Mattias Wille, Peter Rasche, Sabine Theis, Tobias Seinsch, Christina Bröhl and Dr. Alexander Mertens
Who are we?
The junior research group Human Factors Engineering and Ergonomics in Healthcare carries out research on target-group-specific user interfaces for telemedicine systems and services that help to integrate elder and very old humans into the provision of healthcare. Part of the interdisciplinary research group are researchers from the fields of:
- engineering science,
- sociology,
- psychology,
- computer science and
- medicine
Aims
What we want to achieve is that people are able to live in their usual domestic setting independently for a longer time. We especially want to increase the treatment adherence and acceptance in the context of the integration of telemedicine systems and services by means of age-appropriate interfaces. Therefore it is our task to collect profound scientific findings in the context of the use and usability of modern and telemedicine technology while taking into consideration the advancing age of the users.
Motivation
The Federal Statistical Office predicts that by the year of 2050 approx. 23 million people in Germany will be older than 65 years and approx. 10 million people between 65 and 75 years. These changing age structures become very challenging for after-care at home. We can face these challenges by using telemedicine systems. Until now telemedicine systems are not used extensively in standard care in Germany but only for particular indications, e.g. for patients with cardiac pacemakers. In numerous pilot projects it could be proven that those systems have positive effects on the patients’ life quality and that they are effective for various clinical pictures. Nevertheless telemedicine systems are not well-established in practice which is besides numerous inhibitory organizational and legal conditions due to the fact that the usability is insufficient for elderly.