Co-designing a Digital Matching Tool to Strengthen the Dementia Care Workforce and Personalise Home Care

Background: Matching care worker skills and personal attributes to the individual needs and preferences of people living with dementia can enhance care quality, continuity, and job satisfaction. Yet, as workforce pressures grow, larger home care providers struggle to achieve this alignment efficiently. This study explored how computational matching could help create more responsive, person-centred care schedules while supporting workforce continuity and sustainability.

 

Approach: Using Experience-Based Co-Design, six iterative workshop rounds were held with four stakeholder groups: people living with dementia (n=4), family/friend carers (n=6), domiciliary care workers (n=7), and care managers (n=3). Each group first met separately to identify challenges and priorities before joining together to co-design a prototype app. The app aimed to (1) match preferences of clients, carers, and providers, and (2) generate ‘live’, needs-informed schedules that optimise workforce deployment. Across 30 hours of group meetings and individual review, participants shaped both the interface and the algorithm design.

 

Results: The co-design process successfully informed a working prototype that integrates personalisation with workforce planning. The approach demonstrated how technology can facilitate better matching between care worker strengths and client needs, having the potential to improve satisfaction and continuity for both. Iteration allowed participants to navigate tensions between designing for current workforce constraints and envisioning a more sustainable, integrated care system. The process itself enhanced participants’ understanding of workforce interdependencies and highlighted opportunities for digital tools to reduce role strain and inefficiency.

 

 

 

Implications:Co-designing technology with people with lived experience is both feasible and essential for ensuring relevance, usability, and ethical alignment. Our iterative, transparent approach fostered shared understanding and agency across stakeholder groups. Our co-design method was transparent and collaborative. It facilitated shared ownership and identified practical solutions that hold potential to develop interventions that support both people receiving care and those providing it. Findings underline the need to embed lived experience involvement from the earliest research stages and within system-level planning to avoid reproducing inequities in future digital care tools.