WP1. Co-production partnerships

In work package one we held a series of five co-production workshops with three co production groups in Middlesbrough, Bristol and a national online group. Over the course of the workshops, we worked with older people with experience of using social care services to first identify and explore their experiences of engaging with assistive and household technologies to support care, and the factors influencing their use of technologies. Subsequent workshops identified priorities for technologies, factors influencing their use of technology. Together we created a set of key priorities that should be considered when designing and developing technologies in the future.

In this work package, we identified together three overall, person-centred priorities that should be considered when developing both research projects, and programmes for research on the subject of technology enabled care. These were:

Adequate signposting, and information seeking. This would include both digital and analogue forms of information sharing, and to reach residents who are not digitally connected (e.g., social media, email). Such support should include helping people to access care technologies easily, or giving people the opportunity to try any care or household technologies out to see if they are suitable before any purchases

Safety, security and Trust. Trust plays a significant role in the acceptance and effectiveness of both technologies in general and specific care and household technologies. Building trust in technologies can take time, involve cases of trial and error, and may need changes either to an individual technology or between different versions of a technology. A device that works for one person may not work for another. This can be due to a range of factors including aspects of the person and their care needs, the design of the technology itself, characteristics of the services providing them or the social support necessary to make them work.

In addition, many people noted that they increasingly needed to use household technologies such as tablets or smart phones to access services, but their use also placed potentially vulnerable people to risk. For example, using a smart phone to access health services also put people at risk of scams, caused other uses of the phone.  Learning from peers in the community about how to trust and use technologies safely is an important part of generating trust in the safety, and security of a technology, so this needs to be factored into the design of technologies, to the services providing them, and to the physical and social environments where they are being used.

Cost and finance. Issues of cost around technologies, and awareness of cost, continues to be a barrier. Perceptions varied about whether and how much people should have to pay for technologies as part of care services. Many felt able to pay the often relatively low costs for assistive technology care packages, although even these costs could be a barrier to those with greatest need, who may also face greatest challenges in terms of their ability to pay. Poverty remains a major challenge for social care users who are disproportionately from lower socio-economic backgrounds. When household technologies are increasingly becoming an assumed pre-requisite of access many day-to-day services, wider impacts on the ability of social care users to access general community facilities – NHS services, banking etc, remains an important consideration that needs to be addressed. 

More information about our co production work in DIALOGUE can be found in the following publication:

Marston, H. R., Brittain, K., Lynch, J., Lariviere, M., Mehta, R., Thorn, J., … Gibson, G. (2026). Technology use for care, support and social connect in the community: preliminary findings from the DIALOGUE project. Cogent Gerontology, 5(1). https://doi.org/10.1080/28324897.2026.2645518