Promoting Older Residents’ Social Interaction and Wellbeing: A Design Perspective

Cun Li,Jun Hu,Xu Lin,Bart Hengeveld,Caroline Hummels,Kai Kang

doi:10.3390/su12072834

Abstract

The aging society has arrived, and more and more older adults are living in a nursing home. However, institutional care settings are often described as places where residents suffer from social isolation. Under this context, we describe the process of translating into fieldwork into interactive systems facilitating elderly residents’ social interaction and wellbeing. Comprehensive semi-structured interviews with older residents and caregivers were first conducted in a Dutch nursing home, aiming at understanding the status of their social interaction. The context of a typical elderly resident’s social interaction was then generated, and based on which three interactive systems focusing on different aspects of their social interaction were designed and deployed. The paper finally concludes with design considerations for promoting social interaction and wellbeing of older adults living in the nursing home.

Highlights

An aging society has arrived, the worldwide population over age 65 is expected to more than double from 357 million in 1990 to 761 million in 2025 [1]
Older adults are missing opportunities to strengthen their social ties through social media, but more importantly, they have a higher risk of becoming isolated from their younger relatives who increasingly rely on social media to socialize [11]
In response to this situation, this paper shows how we could translate into our fieldwork into interactive systems, bridged by the context of a typical resident’s social interaction

Summary

Introduction

An aging society has arrived, the worldwide population over age 65 is expected to more than double from 357 million in 1990 to 761 million in 2025 [1] In this context, with up to 50% of those over the age of 85 likely to be placed in a nursing home at some point in their lives [2]. Technologies tend not to capitalize on an older population that is connected through the Internet and mobile telephony, nor are the technologies being created to address social isolation [3] Internet and social media use drop off significantly for people age 75 and older [8]—even for the Netherlands is a country with high levels of general Internet diffusion, only around 30% of over-75-year-old had a tablet or smartphones [9,10]. Older adults are missing opportunities to strengthen their social ties through social media, but more importantly, they have a higher risk of becoming isolated from their younger relatives who increasingly rely on social media to socialize [11]

Objectives

Methods

Results

Discussion

Conclusion