Digital Health Engineering and Entrepreneurial Innovation - Education for the Development of ICT for Older Adults

摘要

Considering that more than 20% of Europe's population is above 65 years old (Eurostat, 2017) and the increasing nature of this figure, this one-semester block course was created. Students from various disciplines are introduced to the current challenges of home health care for older adults, learn the fundamentals of entrepreneurship and combine this knowledge to develop and implement digital health app solutions for improving the health of older adults within interdisciplinary teams. The focus of this course is to teach the hard and soft skills necessary to found a start-up and implement a first click-prototype. Methods used in this course include an age-simulation suit, the method of lean startup, design thinking, personas and participative user-centered design to generate and ethically validate ideas. Implementation of the click-prototype is done within MIT Applnventor. Besides this students are trained on how to pitch and present ideas to potential investors. Within this article, the initial development process of this course and results from accompanying scientific evaluation are presented.