Research on the requirement characteristics and differentiated service design of home-based elderly care service in China using the candy model

In response to the escalating aging population in China, this study undertakes a comprehensive requirement analysis and differentiation exploration of home-based elderly care (HBEC) services. 46 HBEC service items across five dimensions are designed by adopting Grounded Theory, including life services, intelligent services, health services, security services and spiritual services. In terms of methodology, an optimized questionnaire based interval Kano model, namely Candy model is proposed and verified. The newly proposed model changes the way requirements are classified and identifies a new category of requirements: critical requirement. By conducting questionnaire surveys, 5 Critical (C), 7 Must-be (M), 21 One-dimensional (O), 6 Attractive (A), and 7 Indifferent (I) requirements are analyzed. The analysis result of importance shows that the importance order of the five kinds of requirements is: C > M > O > A > I. The correlation coefficients between importance and satisfaction/dissatisfaction are both bigger than 0.9, indicating a strong positive correlation between the importance and satisfaction sensitivity. Furthermore, the differentiation analysis is conducted considering factors such as income level, relationship with children and self-care ability. The differentiation of requirements often occurs in the upstream and downstream requirements within the dynamic change pattern "I → A → O(C) → M". This study offers valuable results for addressing the challenges associated with population aging.