Participatory Design of a Smart Home Emergency Response System: Study on Attitudes, Expectations, and Perceived Safety Among Disabled People and Caregivers

Individuals with disabilities face heightened risks during home emergencies due to barriers in communication, mobility, and access to help. Personal Emergency Response Systems aim to mitigate these risks but often fail to accommodate diverse sensory, cognitive, and motor needs, or to foster trust, autonomy, and control. The ADLeR project addresses this gap by developing a Smart Home Emergency Response System (SHERS) that integrates automated detection, alerting, and escalation for incidents such as fires or medical emergencies within specialized housing for residents with disabilities. This formative, participatory-informed evaluation explored perceptions of the planned SHERS among residents with cognitive and/or motor impairments and their caregivers. Semi-structured interviews with ten residents and a focus group with nine caregivers examined perceived safety, attitudes toward, and expectations of the system. Residents’ perceived safety with the proposed SHERS increased from 2.7 to 3.8 (fire) and 3.2 to 4.7 (medical) on a 5-point scale. Both, residents and caregivers expressed strong overall acceptance, highlighting benefits such as faster emergency response and increased independence. Key concerns such as false alarms, surveillance/privacy, loudspeaker anxiety, and technical reliability led to concrete design recommendations, including adjustable detector sensitivity, multimodal alerts, data minimization with transparency, role-based emergency access, and training/support. Accessibility strategies were critical for engagement. Contributions of this work include: (1) a replicable evaluation recipe, (2) early evidence on SHERS acceptance and safety perceptions, and (3) a traceable map from user concerns to design recommendations.