Purpose: To explore inter-professional home evaluators' perspectives and needs for building useful and acceptable decision-support tools for the field of home modifications.
Method: Twenty semi-structured interviews were conducted with a range of home modification professionals from different regions of the United States. The interview transcripts were analyzed with a qualitative, descriptive, perspective approach.
Results: Technology supports current best practice and has potential to inform decision making through features that could enhance home evaluation processes, quality, efficiency and inter-professional communication.
Conclusions: Technological advances with app design have created numerous opportunities for the field of home modifications. Integrating technology and inter-professional best practices will improve home safety evaluation and intervention development to meet client-centred and societal needs. Implications for rehabilitation Understanding home evaluators technology needs for home safety evaluations contributes to the development of app-based assessments. Integrating inter-professional perspectives of best practice and technological needs in an app for home assessments improves processes. Novice and expert home evaluators would benefit from decision support systems embedded in app-based assessments. Adoption of app-based assessment would improve efficiency while remaining client-centred.
Keywords: Environmental design; home adaptations; interdisciplinary communication; software design.