On The Necessity of Multi-disciplinarity in The Development of At-home Health Monitoring Platforms for Older Adults: Systematic review (Preprint)

Abstract

The growth in ageing populations globally has increased the demand for new models of care. At-home, computerized healthcare monitoring is a growing paradigm which explores the possibility of reducing workloads, lowering the demand for resource-intensive secondary care and providing more precise and personalised care. Despite the potential societal benefit of autonomous monitoring systems when implemented properly, uptake in healthcare institutions is slow and a great volume of research across disciplines encounters similar common barriers to real-world implementation.

The goal of this review is to 1) construct an evaluation framework that can assess research in terms of how well it addresses already identified barriers to application and 2) to then use that framework to analyse the literature across disciplines and identify trends between multi-disciplinarity and the likelihood of research being developed robustly.

This paper introduces a scoring framework for evaluating how well individual pieces of research address key development considerations using 10 identified common barriers to uptake found during meta-review from different disciplines across the domain of healthcare monitoring. A scoping review is then conducted using this framework to identify the impact that multi-disciplinarity involvement has on the effective development of new monitoring technologies. Specifically, we use this framework to measure the relationship between the use of multi-disciplinarity in research and the likelihood that a piece of research will be developed in a way that gives it genuine practical application.

We show that viewpoints of multi-disciplinarity; namely across computer science and medicine alongside public and patient involvement (PPI) have a significant positive impact in addressing commonly encountered barriers to application research and development according to the evaluation criteria. Using our evaluation metric, multi-disciplinary teams score on average 5.43/10 compared to 3.5 for teams made up of medical experts and social scientists, and 2.68 for technical-based teams, encompassing computer science and engineering. Also identified is the significant effect that involving either caregivers or end-users in the research in a co-design or PPI-based capacity has on the evaluation score (2.93 without any input and 4.83/3.67 for end-user or caregiver input respectively, on average).

This review recommends that, to limit the volume of novel research arbitrarily re-encountering the same issues in the limitations of their work and hence improve the efficiency and effectiveness of research, multi-disciplinarity should be promoted as a priority to accelerate the rate of advancement in this field and encourage the development of more technology in this domain that can be of tangible societal benefit.