Research Article A Community-Based, Technology-Supported Health Service for Detecting and Preventing Frailty among Older Adults: A Participatory Design Development Process

Copyright © 2015 Lex van Velsen et al.This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Frailty is a multifaceted condition that affects many older adults and marks decline on areas such as cognition, physical condition, and nutritional status. Frail individuals are at increased risk for the development of disability, dementia, and falls. There are hardly any health services that enable the identification of prefrail individuals and that focus on prevention of further functional decline. In this paper, we discuss the development of a community-based, technology-supported health service for detecting prefrailty and preventing frailty and further functional decline via participatory design with a wide range of stakeholders. The result is an innovative service model in which an online platform supports the integration of traditional services with novel, Information Communication Technology supported tools. This service is capable of supporting the different phases of screening and offer