Crowdsourcing Home Healthcare Service: Matching Caretakers With Caregivers for Jointly Rostering and Routing

In this work, we introduce crowdsourcing home healthcare service (CHHS) systems, where caregivers (including nurses, personal care attendants, and housekeepers) from different locations (rather than centralized institutions) offer diverse home healthcare services to caretakers at home. Powered by cloud computing, the CHHS system enables real-time, dynamic, and large-scale matching between caretakers and caregivers based on their preferences and constraints, and determines caregivers’ rostering and routing plans, involving the NP-hard nurse rostering problem (NRP) and the vehicle routing problem (VRP). This work firstly creates a mathematical programming model to jointly roster and route for the CHHS, maximizing the matching scores of caregivers and caretakers based on the preferred features through analytic hierarchy process (AHP), and minimizing caregivers’ overtime and routing costs, under constraints of caregiver skills, regulations, and vehicle routing. The proposed matching score mechanism assigns weights to caretaker preferences, enhancing pairing with preferred caregivers and reducing dissatisfaction. This work proposes a hybrid genetic algorithm with variable neighborhood search (GAVNS), respectively tailored to handle the rostering and routing aspects of CHHS. Simulation indicates that the GAVNS lowers costs by approximately 38% and 26% in rural and city cases, respectively, and outperforms standalone GA and VNS, achieving a 3% additional cost reduction and consistently yielding feasible solutions.

I. Introduction

With advance in medical science and technology, human life expectancy continues to rise, so that the issue of population aging has become increasingly complex and serious. The global elderly population (i.e., aged 65 and over) was 727 million (9.3% of the global population) in 2020; and it was projected to reach more than 1.5 billion (16.0% of the global population) in 2050 [1]. As the elderly population continues to grow, the disabled population is also rising. This trend is accompanied by an increase in various diseases, physical function degradation, and associated derivative problems. Therefore, the government, academia, and related social services institutions are urgently collaborating in implementing various measures. With limited precious medical resources, the demand for home healthcare services (HHS) has risen considerably [2], [3]. In an HHS model, caregivers such as nurses, personal care attendants (PCAs), and housekeepers are dispatched to caretakers’ homes to offer various services, including medication administration, personal support, and housework assistance. This enables caretakers to receive care and services within the convenience of their own homes, the most familiar and safe environment. In addition to enhancing the quality of life for caretakers and allowing them to enjoy family warmth, HHS can conserve medical resources, and can also reduce the occupancy time of hospital beds by long-term patients, making these beds available for other patients more efficiently.