Abstract
There are two distinct bodies of literature on the Internet of Things, one that derives from a technical perspective, while the other comes from a human perspective. From a technical perspective, sensors can automatically detect physical activity, thus enabling elderly people to live independently, while sensors in essence check that they are active, remind them to take their pills, and so on. From a human perspective, people seek control over their lives, good health, social connection, and a sense of well-being that comes from having purpose and feeling competent in daily routines. So are technologies meant to enable users to stay in control of their lives and manage their relations and preferred routines, or do they undermine it, making elderly people feel subjects of surveillance and incompetent, disrupting their daily arrangements? And is there a middle path that we might take in design that creates innovative technologies that are aesthetic in form and function and empowering to use? In this paper, we offer a framework and examples of designs that bridge these perspectives.
Highlights
As the world population grows and gets older, ageing well becomes not just an individual goal, but a broader social and economic concern
These themes, we propose, should take a more central role in the design of Internet of Things (IoT) technologies for healthy ageing: things are embedded in routines and personal arrangements; social relations are founded on reciprocity and engagement; personal values, such as privacy, self-sufficiency, and agency, underpin the sense of dignity in later life
In the introductory sections to this paper we have provided some examples of widely referenced papers that depicted older people as fragile, in constant need of care and medical attention, and passive subjects of “smart” sensing technologies. Those papers resulted from a Google scholar query on “Internet of Things and elderly.”
Summary
As the world population grows and gets older, ageing well becomes not just an individual goal, but a broader social and economic concern. The earliest visions of the Internet of Things (IoT) were founded in supply chain monitoring, making “things” able to identify themselves and their position in the supply chain, for example, using RFID tagging [5] More recently this vision merged to, and extended, the ubiquitous computing (UbiComp) and ambient assisted living body of research, in which “things” are capable of sensing their surroundings, can process and aggregate this information, and possibly act on it. They allow their users to collect data about their own behavior, what is going on at their home or office, and even the behavior and whereabouts of their loved ones, enabling them to reflect or act on such information or to delegate the decision about a proper course of action to a supporting service In this broad context, one key application of the IoT is to support healthy ageing. We will show that, by fostering social engagement and reciprocal care, building on self-fulfillment and individual values, and supporting personal routines and family rituals, IoT research can expand its scope to support a healthy lifestyle and at the same time avoid the stigma that is often associated with assistive technologies
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