Designing a Randomized Trial with an Age Simulation Suit—Representing People with Health Impairments

Due to demographic change, there is an increasing demand for professional care services, whereby this demand cannot be met by available caregivers. To enable adequate care by relieving informal and formal care, the independence of people with chronic diseases has to be preserved for as long as possible. Assistance approaches can be used that support promoting physical activity, which is a main predictor of independence. One challenge is to design and test such approaches without affecting the people in focus. In this paper, we propose a design for a randomized trial to enable the use of an age simulation suit to generate reference data of people with health impairments with young and healthy participants. Therefore, we focus on situations of increased physical activity. This work is funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF, No. 16SV8553). The publication was funded by the Open Access Fund of Universität Trier and the German Research Foundation (DFG) within the Open Access Publishing funding program. peerReviewed other