Empowering Vulnerable Patients at Home: A User-Centered Platform for Natural Language-Driven Integration of Home and Clinical Health Data
Hoogestraat, Anna Thalea and Brandes, Bastian and Klein, Franziska and Schumacher, Anna and Hein, Andreas and Wulff, Antje
Studies in Health Technology and Informatics
As care for old adults increasingly shifts to the home, integrating everyday health data into clinical practice remains a major challenge. Current solutions based on passive sensors or wearable data often lack contextual understanding, leaving clinicians disconnected from the lived experience at home. To address this gap, we propose a user-centered, natural language-based, asynchronous platform enabling patients to communicate relevant health events and contextual insights in their own words. Developed through a participatory design process, our web-based prototype integrates a large language model with interfaces visualizing health and sensor data, and facilitates communication with hospital care teams. The system supports real-time data sharing, thereby contributing to bridging the hospital-home divide. Early feedback has informed iterative technical refinements, and a real-world user study is in progress. This approach represents an important step toward empowering older adults as active partners in their care and enabling more individualized, responsive clinical decision-making.
Juni / 2026
incollection
IOS Press
