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Advancements in medical science and technology, medicine and public health coupled with increased consciousness about nutrition and environmental and personal hygiene have paved the way for the dramatic increase in life expectancy globally in the past several decades. However, increased life expectancy has given rise to an increasing aging population, thus jeopardizing the socio-economic structure of many countries in terms of costs associated with elderly healthcare and wellbeing. In order to cope with the growing need for elderly healthcare services, it is essential to develop affordable, unobtrusive and easy-to-use healthcare solutions. Smart homes, which incorporate environmental and wearable medical sensors, actuators, and modern communication and information technologies, can enable continuous and remote monitoring of elderly health and wellbeing at a low cost. Smart homes may allow the elderly to stay in their comfortable home environments instead of expensive and limited healthcare facilities. Healthcare personnel can also keep track of the overall health condition of the elderly in real-time and provide feedback and support from distant facilities. In this paper, we have presented a comprehensive review on the state-of-the-art research and development in smart home based remote healthcare technologies.

Having access and skills to use social technology, i.e. social internet use, social media and social applications, are considered as being vital to online social connection. Whilst evidence exists around facilitators and barriers to general technology use, evidence is limited with regards to the motivators, skills and tangible offline benefits older technology users experience with social technology. Therefore, this study used a qualitative, exploratory method to understand older adults’ experiences of using social technology to connect with others. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 20 older adults (65+ years) across England, Scotland and Wales. Despite having access to social technology for social connection, and using this technology regularly, multiple barriers impacted motivators and skills for use, namely perceived self-efficacy and fear, the culture of online communication, absence of social capital and physical functioning. Some of these barriers of social technology use are reminiscent of barriers of wider technology use and emphasise the importance of addressing these barriers for digital exclusion, as well as social connection. However, some of these barriers were specific to social technology use and should be considered when providing guidance or interventions to increase older adults’ online social connection. Social connection was a clear tangible outcome to social technology use, and individuals discussed the benefits of using social technology, particularly visual communication tools, for online connection.

The management of chronic diseases requires personalized healthcare that allows older adults to manage their diseases at home. This systematic review aimed to describe the smart home technologies used in the management of chronic diseases in older people. A systematic literature review was conducted on four databases and was reported following the PRISMA statement. Nineteen articles were included. The intervention technologies were classified into three groups: smart home, characterized by environmental sensors detecting motion, contact, light, temperature, and humidity; external memory aids, characterized by a partnership between mobile apps and smart home-based activity learning; and hybrid technology, with the integration of multiple technologies, such as devices installed at patients’ homes and telemedicine. The health outcomes evaluated are vital signs, medication management, ADL-IADL, mobility, falls, and quality of life. Smart homes show great potential in the management of chronic diseases by favouring the control of exacerbations and increasing patients’ safety by providing support in disease management, including support for cognitively impaired older people. The use of smart homes in the community could bring numerous benefits in terms of continuity of care, allowing the constant monitoring of older people by local and hospital health services.

This paper presents a model for studying ageing and technology. It investigates the theoretical gains that can be made by combining insights from Age Studies and Science and Technology Studies (STS). Although technology has become a much more salient part in the everyday lives of older people and investments are high in technologies to deal with the alleged challenges of demographic change, theory development about ageing–technology relations has not kept up with these trends. Partly this is due to the poor connection between the social scientific understanding of ageing and the technically focused discipline of gerontechnology. This has led to an interventionist logic that underlies much of the current and implicit theorising about ageing and technology. We briefly analyse the problems of the interventionist logic and then present a model that conceptualises ageing and technology as co-constituted. We propose this model – which we call the CAT-model – to highlight a number of fundamental ideas about ageing–technology relations. At the centre are four different arenas (life-worlds of older people, design worlds, technological artefacts and images of ageing) in and across which these relations can and should be studied. To develop the model, we build on our own theoretical and empirical work over the last decade, and on examples from recent scholarship that straddle the disciplinary boundaries between STS and Age Studies.

This study investigates what older adults want from social robots. Older adults are often presented with social robots designed based on developers’ assumptions that only vaguely address their actual needs. By lacking an understanding of older adults’ opinions of what technology should or could do for them–and what it should not do–we risk users of robots not finding them useful. Social and humanistic research on the robotization of care argues that it is important to prioritize user needs in technology design and implementation. Following this urgent call, we investigate older adults’ experiences of and approach to social robots in their everyday lives. This is done empirically through a qualitative analysis of data collected from six group interviews on care robots with health care service users, informal caregivers (relatives), and professional caregivers (healthcare workers). Through this “Need-Driven-Innovation” study we argue that, to secure a functional and valuable technology-fit for the user, it is crucial to take older adults’ wishes, fears, and desires about technology into account when implementing robots. It is also crucial to consider their wider networks of care, as the people in these networks also often interact with the assistive technology service users receive. Our study shows that more qualitative knowledge on the social aspect of human-robot interaction is needed to support future robot development and use in the health and care field and advocates for the crucial importance of strengthening the position of user-centered qualitative research in the field of social robotics.

The World Health Organization (WHO) strives to assist and inspire cities to become more “age-friendly”, and the fundamentals are included in the Global Age-Friendly Cities Guide. An age-friendly city enables residents to grow older actively within their families, neighbourhoods and civil society, and offers extensive opportunities for the participation of older people in the community. Over the decades, technology has become essential for contemporary and future societies, and even more imperative as the decades move on, given we are nearly in our third decade of the twenty-first century. Yet, technology is not explicitly considered in the 8-domain model by the WHO, which describes an age-friendly city. This paper discusses the gaps in the WHO’s age-friendly cities model in the field of technology and provides insights and recommendations for expansion of the model for application in the context of countries with a high human development index that wish to be fully age-friendly. This work is distinctive because of the proposed new age-friendly framework, and the work presented in this paper contributes to the fields of gerontology, geography urban and development, computer science, and gerontechnology.

There has been a subsequent increase in the number of elderly people living alone, with contribution from advancement in medicine and technology. However, hospitals and nursing homes are crowded, expensive, and uncomfortable, while personal caretakers are expensive and few in number. Home monitoring technologies are therefore on the rise. In this study, we propose an anonymous elderly monitoring system to track potential risks in everyday activities such as sleep, medication, shower, and food intake using a smartphone application. We design and implement an activity visualization and notification strategy method to identify risks easily and quickly. For evaluation, we added risky situations in an activity dataset from a real-life experiment with the elderly and conducted a user study using the proposed method and two other methods varying in visualization and notification techniques. With our proposed method, 75.2% of the risks were successfully identified, while 68.5% and 65.8% were identified with other methods. The average time taken to respond to notification was 176.46 min with the proposed method, compared to 201.42 and 176.9 min with other methods. Moreover, the interface analyzing and reporting time was also lower (28 s) in the proposed method compared to 38 and 54 s in other methods.

The increasingly more visible trend of population ageing necessitates creating technologies supporting the functioning of older adults. Consequently, more gerontechnologies emerge designed to help the older adults in their daily functioning, from devices monitoring the health to special trolleys improving the mobility or Virtual Reality devices for active learning. This article aimed to determine the most desired group of gerontechnologies among current and future users. It focused on individual assessments of the most desirable group of gerontechnologies based on various criteria. The investigation aimed to find the criterion rated the highest in the selected group of gerontechnologies. The gerontechnology group was assessed against seven groups of criteria distinguished by the authors, i.e., Technology Innovation, Technology Demand, Social and Ethical Criteria, Technology Usability, Technology Functionality, Technology Ease of Use and Technology Use Risk. The survey was conducted in the form of a questionnaire, using CAWI (Computer-Assisted Web Interview) and CATI (Computer-Assisted Telephone Interview) methods, with the research sample comprised of 1 152 residents of Poland. Thus far, no studies have been conducted to evaluate this group of technologies based on the above-mentioned criteria.

COVID-19 has impacted not only the health of citizens, but also the various factors that make up our society, living environments, and ecosystems. This pandemic has shown that future living will need to be agile and flexible to adapt to the various changes in needs of societal populations. Digital technology has played an integral role during COVID-19, assisting various sectors of the community, and demonstrating that smart cities can provide opportunities to respond to many future societal challenges. In the decades ahead, the rise in aging populations will be one of these challenges, and one in which the needs and requirements between demographic cohorts will vary greatly. Although we need to create future smart age-friendly ecosystems to meet these needs, technology still does not feature in the WHO eight domains of an age-friendly city. This paper extends upon Marston and van Hoof’s ‘Smart Age-friendly Ecosystem’ (SAfE) framework, and explores how digital technology, design hacking, and research approaches can be used to understand a smart age-friendly ecosystem in a post-pandemic society. By exploring a series of case studies and using real-life scenarios from the standpoint of COVID-19, we propose the ‘Concept of Age-friendly Smart Ecologies (CASE)’ framework. We provide an insight into a myriad of contemporary multi-disciplinary research, which are capable to initiate discussions and bring various actors together with a positive impact on future planning and development of age-friendly ecosystems. The strengths and limitations of this framework are outlined, with advantages evident in the opportunity for towns, regions/counties, provinces, and states to take an agile approach and work together in adopting and implement improvements for the greater benefits of residents and citizens.

Smart homes equipped with ambient intelligence technology constitute a promising direction to enable the growing number of elderly to continue to live in their own home as long as possible. However, this calls for technological solutions that suit their specific needs and capabilities. The Sweet-Home project aims at developing a new user friendly technology for home automation based on voice command. This paper reports a user evaluation assessing the acceptance and fear of this new technology. Eight healthy persons between 71 and 88 years old, 7 relatives (child, grandchild or friend) and 3 professional carers participated in a user evaluation. During about 45 min, the persons were questioned in co-discovery in the Domus smart home alternating between interview and wizard of Oz periods followed by a debriefing. The experience aimed at testing four important aspects of the project: voice command, communication with the outside world, domotics system interrupting a person’s activity, and electronic agenda. Voice interface appeared to have a great potential to ease daily living for elderly and frail persons and would be better accepted than more intrusive solutions. By considering still healthy and independent elderly people in the user evaluation, an interesting finding that came up is their overall acceptance provided the system does not drive them to a lazy lifestyle by taking control of everything. This particular fear must be addressed for the development of smart homes that support daily living by giving them more ability to control rather than putting them away from the daily routine.