Technology for Home-Delivered Meal Service for Rural Seniors Living Alone: Designing a Mobile App for the Meal Delivery Workers

Abstract

The topics of gerontological welfare and long-term care have been in the spotlight, the needs of those solitary rural elderly who are more vulnerable to food insecurity must also be taken care of. In Taiwan, there are currently over 50 organizations that provide meal delivery service to the rural elderly, most of whom living alone. However, coordinated efforts to improve workflow efficiency of delivery workers for such meal services, such as technology programs implemented by Meals on Wheels in the US(Morris et al., 2019), are lacking. The purpose of this research was to design and develop a mobile app and an information platform that served as the app’s backend, for meal delivery workers who provided meal delivery services to home-bound elderly people living alone in rural areas outside of the Taipei City. The design of the App aimed to correspond to the needs of the delivery workers during each of their meal delivery trips.