How Proficiency and Feelings impact the Preference and Perception of Mobile Technology Support in Older Adults

The relationship between social support and sleep quality in older adults: A review of the evidence

Understanding the factors contributing to neuropsychiatric symptoms (NPS) in older adults with mild behavioral impairment (MBI) is crucial for developing effective interventions. Although psychological resilience and social support are key factors related to NPS, with anxiety and sleep quality playing significant roles, the precise mechanisms underlying their relationships remain unclear. Therefore, we conducted a cross-sectional survey of 328 older adults with MBI in 42 nursing homes across nine cities in Fujian Province, Southeast China, and investigated how psychological resilience, sleep quality, and anxiety influence the relationship between social support and NPS in older adults with MBI. Our findings showed that social support was significantly linked to NPS (β = -0.194, p < 0.001); psychological resilience mediated the relationship between social support and NPS (β = -0.219; confidence interval: -0.291, -0.153); sleep quality moderated the relationship between psychological resilience and social support (β = 0.141, p < 0.001); and anxiety moderated the relationship between social support and NPS (β = -0.117, p = 0.019), as well as that between psychological resilience and NPS (β = -0.189, p < 0.001). These findings highlight the potential of exploring resilience-focused interventions and their effects on social support and NPS in older adults with MBI.Supplementary InformationThe online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1038/s41598-025-17516-x.

Objective Apathy symptoms are common in healthy older adults and may manifest independently of depressive symptoms. Perceived social support is considered a protective factor against adverse health outcomes in aging. We investigated the differential associations of apathy and depressive symptoms with perceived social support in older adults. Method The sample (n = 295) included community dwelling healthy older adults. Apathy was assessed with the Apathy Evaluation Scale, depression with the Geriatric Depression Scale, and perceived social support with the Medical Outcomes Study-Social Support Survey. Results Fully adjusted multiple linear regression revealed that, when jointly modeled as predictors, both apathy (standardized β= −0.214 p<.05) and depressive symptoms (standardized β= −0.157 p<.05) had significant negative associations with perceived social support. Discussion We provide the first evidence that apathy and depressive symptoms have independent associations with perceived social support in older adults.

Purpose To investigate factors influencing provision of care and support to older adults with traumatic injury in Australia, from a health service and policy perspective. Methods Semi-structured interviews were undertaken with 16 clinicians, support providers, researchers, policy makers, and representatives from peak bodies in Australia, who had experience across injury, ageing, and disability sectors. A thematic analysis was performed using a framework approach. Results Themes identified included prolonged injury recovery in older adults, limited accommodation options, restricted access to preventive care, escalating care needs over time, issues with siloed funding schemes and funding availability, and the need for advocacy to coordinate care across different schemes. Certain themes were specific to people who were older when injured. Others related to people who had acquired an injury at a younger age and were ageing with injury. However, most themes had relevance for both groups. Conclusions For older adults, this research has highlighted a range of cross-sector problems which impact upon the potential to recover from injury and to age well with injury. To improve the lives of older adults with injuries, Australia needs better coordinated system interfaces, shared funding models or packages of care across sectors, and improved advocacy and case management. Implications for rehabilitation To address the lack of long-term, multi-disciplinary preventive care for age-related conditions and secondary complications in people with injuries, older adults may need more prolonged, or individualised, care following injury, episodic health checks, and a greater focus on long-term health care. Accessible and well-coordinated specialist housing and support responses, that offer timely access to health care professionals and carers trained in both ageing and disability, and enable greater support for “ageing in place”, are required to manage changing care needs of people ageing with injury. There needs to be greater involvement of geriatricians, nurses, and allied health care professionals within the aged care sector in order to care for people with complex needs, including older adults with injury-related disability. To reduce gaps in care and support for injured older adults, Australia needs better coordinated system interfaces, shared funding models or packages of care across sectors.

This study examined the longitudinal reciprocal effects between health and social support in older adults' relationships with their children and friends. Data are from the 2006 and 2010 waves of the Health and Retirement Study ( N = 3,760). We focused on three specific aspects of social support: frequency of contact, positive interactions, and negative interactions. We used autoregressive cross-lagged models to examine the bidirectional effects between social support and health. When the bidirectional effects between health and social support were simultaneously examined, the longitudinal effect of social support on health was not significant. In contrast, older adults' poor health was associated with decreased contact and decreased positive interactions with friends as well as with increased negative interactions with their adult children and friends. The findings suggest that older adults' poor health has a negative impact on their social relationships and that such effect surpasses the impact of social relationships on health.

This literature review aimed to summarize the existing knowledge surrounding the role of the built environment in supporting older adults' physical and social engagement and identify opportunities for future research and design that facilitates older adults' engagement at multiple environmental scales: from interior spaces to neighborhoods. Physical environments can support or impede older adults' physical and social engagement: willful, motivated involvement in meaningful activity or occupation. Research shows that engagement is a core component of health and well-being and relates to positive health outcomes, including reduced disease risk, better mental health, and improved physical and cognitive function. Thus, designing supportive built environments for engagement can yield significant, positive health and well-being impacts. A systematized search of five databases, a hand search, and an iterative screening process identified 55 studies for inclusion in this review. Through inductive thematic analysis, this review summarizes findings regarding the built environment's role in physical and social engagement in older age and design strategies to facilitate engagement and support health and well-being. Evidence indicates that built environment characteristics can influence older people's physical and social engagement in homes, neighborhoods, and care settings. The thematic analysis of the included studies identified three key themes concerning the relationships of built environment characteristics to older adults' engagement across multiple environmental scales: connection, access, and security. Built environments influence older people's physical and social engagement, significantly affecting their health, well-being, abilities, and longevity. Numerous design strategies can support older adults' engagement, but more research is needed.

In recent years, many Finnish cities and municipalities have aspired to develop services that support older adults’ well‐being and social inclusion. This study focuses on the Social Hub model, a local social innovation developed in the city of Tampere. Social hubs operate on a neighbourhood level, providing free‐of‐charge service coordination and counselling, group activities, and meeting places for social gatherings. This study aims to look at whether this kind of local innovation can support older adults’ well‐being and social inclusion. The sociomaterial perspective and multidimensional model of well‐being (the having–doing–loving–being approach) provided theoretical and analytical guidelines to examine older adults’ experiences and perceptions of social hubs. The qualitative interview data was collected among people living in service housing, senior housing, or ordinary housing in the proximity of the social hubs studied. Face‐to‐face and “go‐along” interviews with 19 older adults aged between 57 and 96 were analysed with theory‐driven content analysis. The results showed that the hubs are a valuable local resource for older adults, providing free services, accessible and appealing shared spaces, and activities that promote social well‐being, physical activity, creativity, and autonomy. The hubs serve as important gathering points for older adults in the neighbourhood, fostering community‐building among citizens residing in different types of housing. The results highlight the importance of acknowledging well‐being as a multidimensional phenomenon. The Social Hub model provides one practical tool to support older adults’ well‐being and social inclusion by offering various kinds of resources and social and cultural activities.

Background: Despite increase in the number of older adults in Nigeria, and the health, social and economic implications that accompany this reality due to burden of care on families, little is known about the role of church-based organisations in the provision of support and care to older adults in Nigeria. The aim of this study was to explore the place of the church in the support and care of older adults. Data Source and Method: Sample size of (n = 40) participants were recruited for the study. Focus Group Discussion and In-depth Interview were employed for data collection. Results: The findings revealed that church-based organisations were a significant source of support for older adults; however, some of the support provided by church-based organisations was exclusively at the reach of older adults who are members of a particular church network. Conclusion: The paper therefore recommends for an all-inclusive support and care for older adults by church-based organisations in the society, irrespective of the one’s religious denomination.

Japan aims to enable older adults to remain at home in their familiar environment. However, the factors associated with daily life support for older adults who require medical and nursing care to remain at home are unclear. This study aimed to clarify the factors associated with daily life support for single older adults needing medical and nursing care to remain at home. Our participants were single older adults aged 65-94 years receiving medical and nursing care and their care providers. First, we analyzed records, which were written by care providers, regarding ten older adults who received medical and nursing care from 2014 to 2018. We categorized occurrences which exert single older adults’ life on change into six factors, such as gradual frailty and loss of a loved one. Then, to consider how they experience these factors, we conducted semi-structured interviews with three additional older adults who were single and received home visiting nursing care service in 2020. During this process, four multidisciplinary researchers discussed the factors associated with daily life support for single older adults; finally, three factors were derived. The first one pertained to health conditions: receiving sufficient medical and nursing care maintain older adults’ physical condition. The second related to the environment: maintaining social interactions (neighbors and friends). The third pertained to older adults’ values and meanings to remain at home. This study suggests that care providers focus on these three factors to help older adults who received medical and nursing care to remain at their home.

We examined the neural substrates of social support in older adults. Social support is associated with better outcomes in many facets of aging-including cognitive and functional health-but the underlying neural substrates remain largely unexplored. Voxel-based morphometry and multivariate statistics were used to identify gray matter volume covariance networks associated with social support in 112 older adults without dementia (M age = 74.6 years, 50% female), using the Medical Outcomes Study Social Support Survey. A gray matter network associated with overall social support was identified and included prefrontal, hippocampal, amygdala, cingulate, and thalamic regions. A gray matter network specifically associated with tangible social support (e.g., someone to help you if you were confined to bed) was also identified, included prefrontal, hippocampal, cingulate, insular, and thalamic regions, and correlated with memory and executive function. Gray matter networks associated with overall and tangible social support in this study were composed of regions previously associated with memory, executive function, aging, and dementia. Longitudinal research of the interrelationships between social support, brain structure, and cognition is needed, but strengthening social support may represent a new path toward improving cognition in aging that should be explored.

ABSTRACTBackground/Study Context: Older adults show lower memory performance than younger adults when a task requires them to create associations (Naveh-Benjamin, 2000, Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 26, 1170–1187). In this study, associative memory was examined in order to assess whether age differences in performance were mitigated when the word pairs to be learned utilized a familiar pattern seen in everyday language (adjective-noun), which we propose as a type of schematic support that capitalizes upon linguistic structure.Methods: Thirty older (66–87 years old) and younger (18–22 years old) adults from the University of Missouri and the surrounding community studied word pairs in noun-noun, adjective-noun, and noun-adjective sequences. A mixed-measures analysis of variance (ANOVA) was used to analyze differences in memory sensitivity (d’) and response bias (C) from separate item and associative recognition memory tests between age groups and between word pair sequences.Results: As expected, older participants did show lower associative memory for noun-noun and noun-adjective pairs than younger adults, a hallmark of an age-related associative binding deficit, but there were no age differences in associative memory for adjective-noun pairs. The latter supports our hypothesis that seeing word pairs in a familiar adjective-noun linguistic sequence can provide support in older adults’ associative processing to mitigate difficulties experienced when binding together word pairs.Conclusion: The results obtained show that older adults can use prior existing knowledge to attenuate their cognitive shortcomings, specifically linguistic structural knowledge, to mitigate their associative binding deficit. Further research is necessary to determine the exact mechanism of improvement mediated by this form of schematic support, namely, whether it results in more effective recruitment of strategic processes such as unitization.

To better support older adults' consumption of high quality health information on the Internet, it is important to understand how older adults make credibility judgments with online health information. For this purpose, we conducted two laboratory studies to explore how the credibility cues in message contents, website features, and user reviews could differentially impact younger and older adults' credibility judgments. Results from the first experiment showed that older adults, compared to younger ones, were less sensitive to the credibility cues in message contents, as well as those in the website features. Results from the second experiment showed that user reviews that were consistent with the credibility cues in message contents could reinforce older adults' credibility judgments. Older adults, compared to younger adults, seemed to be less swayed by user reviews that were inconsistent with the message contents. These results provided implications for designing health information websites that better support older adults' credibility judgments.

Fall risk increases as older adults lose the functional resources necessary to maintain balance while completing everyday activities. As functional resources often decline gradually with age, momentary deficits may not be apparent until after a fall occurs. Mobile fall prevention technologies could support older adults in self-monitoring their ability to safely navigate their environments. In this paper we present perspectives on self-monitoring and feedback in a sample of older adults (n = 20, 50% female, age 65+) who had self-assessed their balance via a smartphone for 30 consecutive days. Thematic analysis of semi-structured interviews showed that fall history differentiated a) participants’ awareness of day-to-day variation in functional ability; b) trust in the accuracy of self-monitoring; and c) imaginations of what types of feedback a mobile fall prevention technology should provide. Insight on older adults’ internal self-monitoring processes and guidelines for feedback design are discussed.

In recent years, an increasing number of studies have addressed the older adults' Information and Communication Technology acceptance, the majority of which concentrate on the use of computers and the internet. As smartphone use becomes further integrated into older adults’ daily lives, it is important to investigate how perceptions about and use of smartphones intersect. This study (1) proposes an extended Technology Acceptance Model and tests the relationships between Perceived Usefulness, Perceived Ease of Use, Attitude, Behavioural Intention, Self-efficacy, Technology Anxiety, and Social Support in older adults’ smartphone use by confirmatory factor analysis (CFA); and (2) analyses the specific differences between primary, medium, and advanced use level groups in each construct by Q-cluster and ANOVAs. We conduct a community-based survey with a sample of 1,006 older adults in East China. The data demonstrate that the extended model offered a good explanation of smartphone acceptance among the older adults, and the groups belong to different use levels show significant difference in all constructs. The findings indicate that digital divide is objectively inevitable in smartphone use, but the older adults are extremely diverse groups that do not uniformly conform to technology averse stereotypes.

BackgroundSocial relations are crucial for maintaining physical and mental health across the life span. As social roles, networks and needs change with age a valid assessment of social support in older adults and age-specific norms are necessary. The present work aims to [1) assess the level of social support in individuals > 60 years of the general German population, [2) evaluate the brief six-item form of the Perceived Social Support Questionnaire (F-SozU K-6) in this age group and to [3) provide age-specific norm values.MethodsWe analyze data of N = 706 people representative for the German population collected in 2021. To assess social support, we used the F-SozU K-6. We tested for selectivity, item difficulty, internal consistency, construct and factor validity, as well as factorial invariance. Additionally, we assessed correlations and associations with depression, loneliness, and sociodemographic factors. Furthermore, we reported norm values for respondents > 60 years.ResultsParticipants > 60 years reported a mean level of 23.97 (SD = 4.82) of social support. Results of the CFA confirmed a very good model fit. Measurement invariance across sex and age was shown. Associations with ADS and LS-S supported construct validity. Multiple regression analysis showed that female sex, increasing age, having a partner, and a higher equivalized household income were associated with higher levels of social support.ConclusionThe F-SozU K-6 is a reliable and economical tool to assess perceived social support in older adults. Norm values for individual > 60 years are provided.