04 Dec Monitoring and evaluating open platforms in the AHA domain

Posted at 08:00h in News by

PlatformUptake.eu has set up a methodology for monitoring evaluating the uptake and other success indicators of existing platforms in the Active and Healthy Ageing (AHA) domain. This methodology will allow the measurement of the set of Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) that have been defined in previous work of the project, and the general monitoring and evaluation of open platforms. The measurement can be applied to each of the use cases for acquiring more knowledge on the successful uptake of a platform.

The PlatformUptake.eu monitoring methodology is based on the collection of KPI results and will keep track of projects’ inputs and outputs in the three dimensions: technical, business and contextual.

Five types of evaluation are suggested to evaluate the relevance, effectiveness, efficiency, impact, and sustainability of the open platforms. Evaluation criteria include:

  • Cost: evaluates if the platform is expensive or not, has complex or simple maintenance structures and support prices, and which are similar, competing platforms.
  • End-user knowledge: prioritisation of solutions that are intuitive and involve end-users in the co-creation of the systems encourages user adoption. This is especially important for solutions that reach diverse audiences, such as portals or collaboration tools.
  • Risk: determination of the level of risk for long-term costs, integration capability, product chaining risk and end-user satisfaction.
  • Control: balance between centralisation and distribution control to streamline decision making and maintain the level of responsiveness influences the performance and success of the platform.
  • Heterogeneity: the division of monitoring and evaluation tasks by involved open platform stakeholders gives more assertive results and can simplify the process. Define which monitoring and evaluation instruments (questionnaires, platform features or statistics) should be performed by whom, and the frequency of monitoring or evaluations.

The presented methodology provides a solid and complete tool (with more than 50 questions around the technical, business and contextual dimensions) that will support the monitoring and evaluation of open platforms uptake, in a user-friendly way. The quantity of questions and the different stakeholders involved ensure that this evaluation methodology provides a comprehensive overview.

This methodology will be used to implement the monitoring and self-assessment tools that will be developed in upcoming work of the PlatformUptake.eu project. These tools will allow to analyse the evolution of the selected platforms.

If you are providing/developing open platforms, or AHA/AAL solutions, or if you are (interested in) using such solutions, contact us to get involved: office@platformuptake.eu.