[Home safety and severe mental disorders: Developing an evaluation tool]

Development of an Assistive Technology for Cognition to Support Meal Preparation in Severe Traumatic Brain Injury: User-Centered Design Study

Background

Although assistive technology for cognition (ATC) has enormous potential to help individuals who have sustained a severe traumatic brain injury (TBI) prepare meals safely, no ATC has yet been developed to assist in this activity for this specific population.

Objective

This study aims to conduct a needs analysis as a first step in the design of an ATC to support safe and independent meal preparation for persons with severe TBI. This included identifying cooking-related risks to depict future users’ profiles and establishing the clinical requirements of the ATC.

Methods

In a user-centered design study, the needs of 3 future users were evaluated in their real-world environments (supported-living residence) using an ecological assessment of everyday activities, a review of their medical files, a complete neuropsychological test battery, individual interviews, observational field notes, and log journals with the residents, their families, and other stakeholders from the residence (eg, staff and health professionals). The needs analysis was guided by the Disability Creation Process framework.

Results

The results showed that many issues had to be considered for the development of the ATC for the 3 residents and other eventual users, including cognitive issues such as distractibility and difficulty remembering information over a short period of time and important safety issues, such as potential food poisoning and risk of fire. This led to the identification of 2 main clinical requirements for the ATC: providing cognitive support based on evidence-based cognitive rehabilitation to facilitate meal preparation and ensuring safety at each step of the meal preparation task.

Conclusions

This needs analysis identified the main requirements for an ATC designed to support meal preparation for persons with severe TBI. Future research will focus on implementing the ATC in the residence and evaluating its usability.

SÉCuRE: A clinical tool for comprehensively assessing home safety of people with mental illness

Introduction

People with severe mental illness benefit from a growing number of measures aimed at supporting independent housing. The purpose of the study was to develop a comprehensive home safety assessment tool.

Method

The tool's elaboration was done in three phases. The planning phase was intended to circumscribe the phenomenon, providing input for the development phase, which consisted of creating and enhancing the tool's prototypes. The evaluation phase then featured the tool's translation validity (relevance, exhaustiveness, clarity, and apparent clinical utility), with four successive rounds of expert consultation ( n = 20). Changes were made to the tool according to the experts' suggestions.

Findings

The proposed tool, SÉCuRE, adopts a structured professional judgment approach that is designed to be used collaboratively and interprofessionally, with a specific role for occupational therapists. It aims to systematize the assessment of contributive factors (risk and protective), all stakeholders' expectations and needs and the identification of potential ethical issues. The findings supported the translation validity and acceptance of the tool by clinicians.

Conclusion

SÉCuRE was developed to assist with clinical judgment regarding home safety interventions. It is hoped that its use may ultimately foster home safety in the context of recovery.

Modelizing home safety as experienced by people with mental illness

RATIONALE

As more individuals with mental disorders now live in the community and as the custodial care housing model has shifted to supported housing, home safety has become a rising issue, however, not well documented.

OBJECTIVES

To describe the phenomenon of home safety for people with a mental disorder as well as its contributing factors.

METHODS

A descriptive qualitative design was used. Individual interviews were conducted with persons with a mental disorder (n = 8), while focus groups were conducted with relatives, health and social service providers and community stakeholders (n = 21). The data were analyzed with the grounded theory analysis as described by Paillé (1994).

RESULTS

Findings suggest that home safety implies risk and protective factors, which are associated with (1) the person's characteristics; (2) the quality of the home environment; (3) the nature of the activities in which the individual engages. These dimensions are interrelated so that home incidents arise from a dynamic interaction between risk and protective factors.

CONCLUSIONS

Home incidents therefore occur when the interaction between these dimensions is altered. Considering this situation, Occupational Therapists are well positioned to play a leading role and act as key contributors in the area of home safety in people with mental disorders.