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There is a growing policy impetus to promote carer well-being through the provision of personalised short breaks. However, understanding of what makes for a successful personalised short break is limited. This paper aims to identify key evidence gaps and considers how these could be addressed.

A scoping review mapping the evidence base relevant to respite and short breaks for carers for older people, including those living with dementia, was completed. National and international literature published from 2000 onwards was reviewed. The scoping review focused on well-being outcomes, identified by previous research, as being important to carers.

Most studies investigating the outcomes of short breaks for carers supporting older people focus on traditional day and residential respite care. Although there have been developments in more personalised break options for carers, research exploring their impact is scarce. There is limited knowledge about how these personalised breaks might support carers to realise important outcomes, including carer health and well-being; a life alongside caring; positive caregiving relationships; choices in caring; and satisfaction in caring. Three priority lines of inquiry to shape a future research agenda are identified: understanding what matters – evidencing personalised short break needs and intended outcomes; capturing what matters – outcomes from personalised short breaks; and commissioning, delivering and scaling up personalised short breaks provision to reflect what matters.

This paper contributes to the development of an outcome-focused research agenda on personalised short breaks.

The purpose of this paper is to outline how personal health budgets and a universal, integrated model of support, can positively transform the way in which individuals with a learning disability experience their health and support needs.

The review recognises that Integrated Personal Commissioning, as a policy approach, provides the framework to offer personalised care, and enables people to live an independent, happy, healthy and meaningful life.

Evidence suggests that a personalised and integrated approach to both health and social care not only offers better outcomes on all levels for the individual, but also benefits the system as a whole.

The study reveals that a personalised care leads to people to have choices and control over decisions that affect in better health and wellbeing outcomes for people.

Introduction: Lately, various tendencies to approach personalized medicine (PM) have developed. However, their result is a mutual application of technology without considering the essence of this field. The comprehensive approach to the concept of PM reveals some aspects that need to be dealt with for a successful implementation.

Aim: Identifying possible ways of implementing PM through person-centered care, with an overall positive economic impact, improved medical services, and customer satisfaction.

Methods: The research carried out represents a retrospective descriptive cross-sectional study. Qualitative and quantitative methods were used.

Findings: PM plays an increasingly important role in the political agenda of different countries, to approve an effective method of prevention, diagnosis, and treatment of various diseases. The postponement of its implementation by the authorities and the lack of public policies lead to the unjustified expenditure of public money and contribute to halting the development of the medical system through managerial inefficiency.

The originality of the study: Different approaches to PM and its implementations are analyzed in the context of the challenges of the contemporary economy.

Implications: The research is carried out in the Academy of Economic Studies of Moldova within the state research programs.

The decline of the motoric and cognitive functions of the elderly and the high risk of changes in their vital signs lead to some disabilities that inconvenience them. This paper aims to assist the elderly in their daily lives through personalized and seamless technologies.

The authors developed a personalized adaptive system for elderly care in a smart home using a fuzzy inference system (FIS), which consists of a predictive positioning system, reflexive alert system and adaptive conditioning system. Reflexive sensing is obtained from a body sensor and environmental sensor networks. Three methods comprising the FIS generation algorithm – fuzzy subtractive clustering (FSC), grid partitioning and fuzzy c-means clustering (FCM) – were compared to obtain the best prediction accuracy.

The results of the experiment showed that FSC produced the best F₁-score (96 per cent positioning accuracy, 94 per cent reflexive alert accuracy, 96 per cent air conditioning accuracy and 95 per cent lighting conditioning accuracy), whereas others failed to predict some classes and had lower validation accuracy results. Therefore, it is concluded that FSC is the best FIS generation method for our proposed system.

Personalized and seamless technologies for elderly implies life-share awareness, stakeholder awareness and community awareness.

This paper presents a model of personalized adaptive system based on their preferences and medical reference, which consists of a predictive positioning system, reflexive alert system and adaptive conditioning system.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the impact of personalisation policy on the providers of social care services in England, mainly to older people, within the context of austerity and different conceptions of personalisation.

The paper draws on part of a longitudinal study of the care workforce, which involved 188 interviews with managers and staff, undertaken in two rounds.

Four themes were identified: changing understandings and awareness of personalisation; adapting services to fit new requirements; differences in contracting; and the impact on business viability.

The paper reflects a second look at the data focussing on a particular theme, which was not the focus of the research study. Furthermore, the data were gathered from self-selecting participants working in services in four contrasting areas, rather than a representative sample.

The research raises questions about the impact of a commercial model of “personalised care”, involving personal budgets (PBs) and spot contracts, on the stability of social care markets. Without a pluralistic, well-funded and vibrant social care market, it is hard to increase the consumer choice of services from a range of possible providers and, therefore, fulfil the government’s purposes for personalisation, particularly in a context of falling revenues from local authorities.

The research presents an analysis of interviews with care providers and care workers mainly working with older people. Their views on personalisation have not often been considered in contrast to the sizeable literature on PBs recipients and social workers.

When wearable and implantable devices first arose in the 1970s, they were rigid and clashed dramatically with our soft, pliable skin and organs. The past two decades have witnessed a major upheaval in these devices. Traditional electronics are six orders of magnitude stiffer than soft tissue. As a result, when rigid electronics are integrated with the human body, severe challenges in both mechanical and geometrical form mismatch occur. This mismatch creates an uneven contact at the interface of soft-tissue, leading to noisy and unreliable data gathering of the body’s vital signs. This paper aims to predict the role that discreet, seamless medical devices will play in personalized health care by discussing novel solutions for alleviating this interface mismatch and exploring the challenges in developing and commercializing such devices.

Since the form factors of biology cannot be changed to match those of rigid devices, conformable devices that mimic the shape and mechanical properties of soft body tissue must be designed and fabricated. These conformable devices play the role of imperceptible medical interfaces. Such interfaces can help scientists and medical practitioners to gain further insights into the body by providing an accurate and reliable instrument that can conform closely to the target areas of interest for continuous, long-term monitoring of the human body, while improving user experience.

The authors have highlighted current attempts of mechanically adaptive devices for health care, and the authors forecast key aspects for the future of these conformable biomedical devices and the ways in which these devices will revolutionize how health care is administered or obtained.

The authors conclude this paper with the perspective on the challenges of implementing this technology for practical use, including device packaging, environmental life cycle, data privacy, industry partnership and collaboration.

This paper aims to explore gift personalization, i.e. the design of gifts by givers on mass-personalization platforms, from the perspective of the gift recipient.

Given the exploratory objectives of this study, the qualitative approach was deemed suitable. Two complementary qualitative studies (i.e. semi-structured interviews and critical incidents) have been conducted, and the narratives have been thematically analyzed.

Gift recipients value gift personalization because of the utility they derive from the product, as well as the ability of the personalized gift to express the giver. Recipients recognize the capacity of the personalized gift to communicate symbolically the giver; they appreciate not only the enhanced attributes of the end product but also the process that led to it, which is imagined as creative and risky. The inherent expressivity of the personalized gift makes it highly valuable in the recipient’s eyes, even when it fails to please him or her.

This research redefines the boundaries of personalization value based on the perceptions of consumers who are not involved in the design process; highlights implications of personalization for firms targeting givers as users of their mass-personalization platforms; and proposes a research agenda to further investigate personalization in marketing.

The purpose of this paper is to explore care home providers’ public communications covering their commitments to respecting residents’ the human rights. The discussion considers the United Nations guiding principles on business and human rights United Nations Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights (UNGPs) and a domestic legal and regulatory human rights framework.

Qualitative content analysis undertaken in 2017 of 70 websites of England’s largest commercial care home providers.

There are strong value-based public commitments in the websites of many English care home providers, which may or may not be interpreted as expressing their commitments to human rights.

Research was limited to websites, which are public facing and marketing tools of care home providers. This does not provide inferences regarding the practical implementation of value-based statements or human-rights-based procedures or policies. This paper does not make any value judgements regarding either the public communications of care home providers or normative claims regarding human rights and care home service provision.

There is a need for clarification and debate about the potential role and added value of the corporate responsibility to respect human rights and the UNGPs’ operating principles within the English residential care sector. Further exploration of the relationship between personalisation/person-centred care and human rights might be useful.

This paper introduces the UNGPs and corporate responsibility to respect human rights to the debate on human rights, personalised/person-centred care, safeguarding and care homes in England. It adds a new perspective to discussions of the human rights obligations of care home providers.

The article discusses how care programmes and integrated care pathways can be linked, finding ways to improve healthcare process professional and logistical quality from a supply chain and a network point‐of‐view.

The authors argue that owing to cost containment goals and increasing healthcare demand, healthcare services systems are challenged to improve service quality, whilst at the same time finding ways to improve delivery processes. It explores if the combination of two instruments, care programmes and integrated care pathways, can meet both goals. This combination is illustrated by an example from the Institute of Mental Health Care Eindhoven en de Kempen.

Analysis suggests that care programmes can be combined with integrated care pathways, leading to a situation where both quality and process improvement can be reached. These instruments are complementary.

The article is largely conceptual; ideas are presented to stimulate thinking rather than to prove an argument.

Combining care programmes and integrated care pathways has implications for the way we think about and organise healthcare processes.

There have been few publications on instruments combining both a network and a supply chain approach to describe and understand healthcare processes.

Previous literature about race equality in social care has identified specific examples of good practice, but also a lack of widespread action by services to address both race discrimination and cultural competence. This paper is based on work by the Commission for Social Care Inspection to produce a practice‐focussed bulletin for social care service providers about providing appropriate services for black and minority ethnic people. It is based on evidence from self‐assessment work by services and importantly, the views and experiences of black and minority ethnic people using social care services. The findings suggest that only a minority of services are taking specific action on race equality and that there is an under‐reporting of concerns by black and minority ethnic people using services. The key to appropriate services is not adapting existing services based on generalisations about ‘culture’ but providing culturally competent, personalised support that addresses individual needs alongside a systematic approach to remove barriers to race equality in the service.