Background:

With a global increase in life expectancy, focus on technologies that can enhance both physical and mental health in older people, including frail and impaired older adults has increased. Similarly, an in-creased research interest in how technology can promote well-being and self-management of health in older age has developed, including methods for designing complex technological ecosystems that meet the various medical, psychological, and social needs of an ageing population. Despite this increase, there remains an opportunity to further understand the needs of this population group to ensure uptake of new health technologies and to avoid introducing additional challenges when introducing new tech-nologies, e.g., due to poor design. This scoping review thus seeks to identify both methods used to involve frail and impaired older people in the design of health technology and that ensures that the voices and needs of this population group is heard and used in designing new technology. We limit the scope to health technologies meant to enable older people to age in place and enhance overall health and well-being.

Objective:

This scoping review sought to explore the ways by which frail and impaired older people are involved in various aspects of the design of new health technology. This included a focus on recruitment strategies, as well as the contribution and specific methods used to address the perspectives, needs and de-sires of frail and impaired older people.

Methods:

A scoping review was conducted in accordance with the PRISMA-ScR reporting [1] from February 2021 to April 2021. Literature searches were conducted in PubMed, Scopus (Web of Science), Embase, and IEEE using a search string covering the concepts of health technology, older people, frail and impaired, user-centred design, and self-management.

Results:

1891 studies were imported for screening from the initial search. A total of 22 studies were included in this review after full text screening and hand search. Invitation through partners was the most common-ly reported recruitment strategy to involve frail or impaired older people in the design of new health technology. Further, while older people were involved in many aspects of the design, they were most commonly involved in the final evaluation of the development process.

Conclusions:

While there is literature on methods for involving frail or impaired older people in the design of new health technology, there is little methodological dialogue on the nuances of how different methods for involvement relates to and shapes the outcome of the development process