Development of Survey Instruments to Guide the Design of Health Status Monitoring Systems for the Elderly: Content Validity Evaluation

The development of technologies for monitoring the health status of older adults in their living settings is a long and expensive process that involves multiple stakeholders. If the technology is to be mass produced, widely deployed and utilized by different user groups, the technology has to meet certain feasibility criteria, including being acceptable, useful, and potentially beneficial to all the different users. This paper describes the development, content and content validity evaluation results of three custom survey instruments designed to assess the feasibility of using in-home health status, monitoring technologies. The instruments were designed to solicit input from three primary stakeholders in the care process: the monitoring candidate older adults, professional caregivers, and informal caregiver. The validity of the instruments content was evaluated by ten field experts who were asked to score each question in each of the three survey instruments on a 4-point Likert scale on relevance, clarity, and simplicity. All three survey instruments received significantly high overall mean content validity scores. The content validity evaluation results indicated that these instruments are ready to be used to solicit users' requirements from the user groups to guide the refinement of monitoring technologies.