ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Med.
Sec. Geriatric Medicine
Volume 12 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fmed.2025.1700646
This article is part of the Research TopicEnvironmental Conditions and Healthy AgingView all articles
Optimizing Equipment Requirements and Configuration Rules for Elderly Home Treatment Environments: A Rough Set Analysis Framework
Provisionally accepted
- 1Nanchang University, Nanchang, China
- 2Institute for Research on Cultural Resources and Industries, Nanchang, China
- 3Guangdong University of Finance & Economics, Guangzhou, China
- 4Tongji University, Shanghai, China
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Background: With the acceleration of global population aging, elderly individuals in sub-health and pre-frailty states face increasing health risks that undermine quality of life. Home treatment devices offer a promising solution, but the key antecedent conditions and their configurational interactions remain unclear. Methods: This study adopted a configurational approach to identify and analyze the key antecedent conditions influencing elderly users' satisfaction. Potential indicators were collected through an expanded snowballing literature review and refined using the Fuzzy Delphi Method (FDM) with 18 experts (June-July 2025), resulting in nine key conditions across four dimensions. A structured questionnaire was administered to 163 elderly respondents (aged 60-80) in Qingdao, China. Rough Set Analysis (RSA) was applied, with key configuration selection based on a coverage threshold of 10%. Results: Ten valid rules were obtained, revealing multiple causal pathways for both satisfaction and dissatisfaction. The dominant satisfaction pathway (Safety = 5 & Cost Control = 5) covered 45.37% of cases, whereas the main dissatisfaction pathway (Safety = 2 & Usefulness = 2) covered 35.71%. High safety and usefulness are key conditions, but their effects depend on combinations with cost, cultural, health, and policy-related conditions. Dissatisfaction, in contrast, is often triggered by low levels of basic conditions. These findings demonstrate causal complexity, equifinality, and asymmetry, extending configurational theory to the domain of home treatment devices and providing practical guidance for device design and policy development.
Keywords: Aging Population, Sub-health, home environment, home treatment devices, rehabilitation Therapy, Rough set analysis
Received: 07 Sep 2025; Accepted: 09 Oct 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Wang, Ding, Zhou, Li and Zhang. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence:
Xiao-Cheng Li, 13902220623@139.com
Yifan Zhang, 2333805@tongji.edu.cn
Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.