The role of semiotic textology in assessing ict-based intervention for carers.

Information and communication technologies (ICTs) are a powerful driver of development in many fields, especially experimenting their potentialities in supporting peopleࢠs activities and, in a direct or indirect way, quality of life. In particular, research on technologically-innovative care and support services is currently addressing needs of dependent older people and their family carers. There is some evidence that demonstrates the positive impact of such technology-based interventions on these categories of users in many different ways. However, research in this specific field has been affected by several limits. In fact, current practice in impact assessment of ICT-based interventions is lacking of good evidence that can explain in a systematic way the outcomes of single technologies, failing to lead to comparable results: there is few attention in describing the nature of ICTs, their features and the type of communication established. There is a gap concerning the role of communication research in the field, not yet considered. The paradox is to plan, implement and evaluate an ICT-based intervention without considering at any stage the initiative from a communication point of view, i.e. its real essence. In fact, when talking about ICT-based services, we are basically dealing with the broad fields of human communication and signification processes. Even if some applications of communication sciences can be found in the field of public health, no research was conducted on the impact of ICTs on home care contexts from a communication perspective. In this sense, the Semiotic Textology discipline was never applied neither to the public health sector nor to ICTs: since it works with an interdisciplinary framework and with a complex notion of sign, as well as with a metalanguage for making different disciplines interoperate with the same concepts, it may constitute a good theoretical framework for analysing features and functions of social (communication) interactions enabled by ICTs in home care settings. This dissertation aims to fill the previous mentioned gaps through the development of an interdisciplinary theoretical framework for assessing the impact of ICT-based interventions for carers, applying and adapting selected theoretical instruments from Semiotic Textology. The attempt is to consider such initiatives from a communicative point of view ࢠtotally missing from current research ࢠand show the added value of a well-defined framework that puts communication at its centre. Indeed, the development of a theoretical and conceptual framework is the main output of the present research. Of course, such a goal required a multi-step methodology to be achieved. A general literature review on Semiotic Textology is carried out in order to explain the main theoretical pillars. This is a necessary step, since literature is very fragmented (even in more languages) and there are no updated, comprehensive works summarising the discipline. As well, also a literature review on ICT-based interventions for carers is carried out as means for identifying a conceptual core framework from available evidence. The review aims to summarise results from recent papers (2000-2011) describing the impact of initiatives and to discuss them according to some crucial communication dimensions: technologies, actors, interactions and proximal goals. In addition, a general methods section aims to describe the CARICT project, its methodology and findings, because the final framework is developed on the basis of the data-set created within the project: CARICT mapped and analysed over 50 ICT-based interventions for carers in Europe, that constitutes the largest database available at this time. The overall theoretical and conceptual framework is developed by integrating results and implications coming from the literature review with recent European studies that analysed in-depth these ICT-based solutions. Such operation is finalised by the development of semiotic-textological theoretical constructs and their application to the CARICT database, which allowed to consider further improvements of the framework. Finally, the overall framework is further developed and structured into five typologies of constitutive factors ࢠaddressing the main aspects of communication and signification processes in ICT-based interventions ࢠthrough a detailed analytical framework that deconstructed each intervention in minimum interactions providing a formalisation of their features.