Privacy in Aged Care Monitoring Devices (ACMD): The Developers' Perspective

"Aging in place" refers to older adults remaining in their home as they age to maintain their independence and attachment with their community. The preference to "age in place" has led to increasing use of aged care monitoring devices to monitor the health, safety and wellbeing of older adults while living alone in their home. However, these devices raise privacy concerns as they are designed to collect, use and share sensitive data from the older adults' private life in order to provide its real-time monitoring capabilities. This study involved interviewing developers from companies that design or deploy aged care monitoring devices about how they view privacy. The study found that developers mostly link privacy to unauthorized/uncontrolled access to users' data, data security risks and human errors. We advocate aged care monitoring devices companies to expand their view of privacy and to adopt a sociotechnical approach when addressing privacy in their developed devices. This involves considering human issues when addressing privacy, rather than focusing exclusively on technical solutions for privacy problems.