Eldercare Technology Research Articles

Control Matters in Elder Care Technology:: Evidence and Direction for Designing It In.

Studies find that older adults want control over how technologies are used in their care, but how it can be operationalized through design remains to be clarified. We present findings from a large survey (n=825) of a well-characterized U.S. online cohort that provides actionable evidence of the importance of designing for control over monitoring technologies. This uniquely large, age-diverse sample allows us to compare needs across age and other characteristics with insights about future users and current older adults (n=496 >64), including those concerned about their own memory loss (n=201). All five control options, which are not currently enabled, were very or extremely important to most people across age. Findings indicate that comfort with a range of care technologies is contingent on having privacy- and other control-enabling options. We discuss opportunities for design to meet these user needs that demand course correction through attentive, creative work.

Assisted Living

I wanted to tell a story from the point of view of a data entry worker, someone not typically considered when the advantages and disadvantages of eldercare technologies are being assessed. The worker, remotely located and unknown to the people she watches, offers a perspective that points out some of the strangeness of watching from a distance a living person being injured, struggling, or just needing human care and attention. As we move into more widespread use of eldercare technologies, it’s worth considering how surveillant and robotic technologies to support independent elder living could change our relationships with and sensitivity to older populations.

Subverting the logics of “smartness” in Singapore: Smart eldercare and parallel regimes of sustainability

This paper argues that the divergent logics of “smartness” and “sustainability” can lead to parallel regimes of sustainability. Whilst sustainability is often used to justify the need for smart cities, smart cities are often undermined by the neoliberal logics of digital governance. Moreover, because the intersection of digital technologies and society is a negotiated one, smart solutions often fail to provide adequate solutions to social problems. This is especially true when smart solutions are used to augment or replace hitherto human-centred processes, like caregiving. Parallel regimes of sustainability are an outcome of these failures. Drawing on an analysis of a trial of in-home smart eldercare technologies in Singapore, four binary pairings – public-private, individual-community, remote-proximate and passive-active – are used to define the parallel regimes of sustainable eldercare that emerged in response to smart technologies. To conclude, the need for urban paradigms to evolve in conversation with society is emphasised.

Sensor-Based Passive Remote Monitoring and Discordant Values: Qualitative Study of the Experiences of Low-Income Immigrant Elders in the United States.

BackgroundRemote monitoring technologies are positioned to mitigate the problem of a dwindling care workforce and disparities in access to care for the growing older immigrant population in the United States. To achieve these ends, designers and providers need to understand how these supports can be best provided in the context of various sociocultural environments that shape older adults’ expectations and care relationships, yet few studies have examined how the same remote monitoring technologies may produce different effects and uses depending on what population is using them in a particular context.ObjectiveThis study aimed to examine the experiences and insights of low-income, immigrant senior residents, family contacts, and staff of housing that offered a sensor-based passive monitoring system designed to track changes in movement around the home and trigger alerts for caregivers. The senior housing organization had been offering the QuietCare sensor system to its residents for 6 years at the time of the study. We are interested in adoption and discontinuation decisions and use over time, rather than projected acceptance. Our research question is how do cultural differences influence use and experiences with this remote monitoring technology? The study does not draw generalizable conclusions about how cultural groups interact with a given technology, but rather, it examines how values are made visible in elder care technology interactions.MethodsA total of 41 participants (residents, family, and staff) from 6 large senior housing independent living apartment buildings were interviewed. Interviews were conducted in English and Korean with these participants who collectively had immigrated to the United States from 10 countries.ResultsThe reactions of immigrant older adults to the passive monitoring system reveal that this tool offered to them was often mismatched with their values, needs, and expectations. Asian elders accepted the intervention social workers offered largely to appease them, but unlike their US-born counterparts, they adopted reluctantly without hope that it would ameliorate their situation. Asian immigrants discontinued use at the highest rate of all residents, and intergenerational family cultural conflict contributed to this termination. Social workers reported that none of the large population of Russian-speaking residents agreed to use QuietCare. Bilingual and bicultural social workers played significant roles as cultural navigators in the promotion of QuietCare to residents.ConclusionsThis research into the interactions of culturally diverse people with the same monitoring technology reveals the significant role that social values and context play in shaping how people and families interact with and experience elder care interventions. If technology-based care services are to reach their full potential, it will be important to identify the ways in which cultural values produce different uses and responses to technologies intended to help older adults live independently.

New cultures of care? The spatio-temporal modalities of home-based smart eldercare technologies in Singapore

ABSTRACT Increasingly, technology-enabled strategies of eldercare are being developed and deployed to minimize the socio-economic costs of ageing. As part of this shift, home-based ‘smart’ technologies have been embraced as a way of enabling ageing-in-place. Smart technologies flatten space and time, and can increase the reach of caregivers. In this sense, they foreground the emergence of new cultures of care. Through an empirical focus on the triallists of smart eldercare technologies living in a public housing estate in Singapore, this paper considers the ways in which new cultures of care are being formed and negotiated in response to the encroachment of smart technologies into pre-existing practices of caregiving. Specifically, it explores how the potential value of smart technologies can be undermined by the politics of responsiveness, and the dialectic of remoteness and proximity. To conclude, we highlight the need for understandings of smart eldercare technologies to be better situated within the varied socio-spatial contexts to which they are applied.

Smart eldercare in Singapore: Negotiating agency and apathy at the margins

Around the world, smart technologies are being embraced as a cost-efficient means of enabling the elderly to be cared for in new, more non-proximate ways. They can facilitate ageing-in-place, and have the potential to relieve pressure on the providers of care. Yet, the fact is that the interface of technology and society is a negotiated one. These negotiations are most acutely felt when technology is used to supplement the hitherto human-centred process of caregiving, especially amongst “marginalised” societal cohorts, like the elderly. With this, there is a need to better understand the ways in which smart eldercare technologies are used, misused, or not used by those that they are designed to benefit. Drawing on qualitative data derived from triallists of three smart eldercare technologies in Singapore, this paper explores how the lived experience of smart eldercare can cause agentic and apathetic behaviours towards technology to manifest. Specifically, we identify four expectations – of understanding, response, compliance and appreciation – that undermine the potential beneficence of smart eldercare. To conclude, we emphasise the need for more collaborative, and more contextually-sensitive, approaches to the design, development and implementation of smart eldercare solutions.

Toward an ElderCare Living Lab for Sensor-Based Health Assessment and Physical Therapy

There is an increasing demand to develop innovations in eldercare technologies that can be delivered as 'Apps' at a cloud-scale to facilitate proactive monitoring and targeted care coordination. This article presents the design for an 'ElderCare-as-a-SmartService' (ECaaS) system that integrates Apps for in-home health monitoring, and remote physical therapy coaching, respectively. The focus is on the transformation of the Apps into a cloud-based living lab, which then enables on-going App development/refinement to realize a real-world enhanced living environment for eldercare that is secure, privacy-preserving and socially embedded. We detail the system and network requirements for cloud-based delivery of ECaaS Apps featuring sensor data analysis and interactive interfaces across urban, suburban and rural areas. We conclude with a proposal for sociotechnical investigations that can be lead to a human-centered design that engages older adults and care coordinators as co-developers of ECaaS, while also simultaneously improving their quality of life.

Combining Eldercare Technology with Interactive Arts Environment

Combining Eldercare Technology with Interactive Arts Environment

Eldercare Technology for Clinical Practitioners

Eldercare Technology for Clinical Practitioners

Eldercare Technology for Clinical Practitioners

Eldercare Technology for Clinical Practitioners