Technology interventions have great potential to support the complex needs of older adults living in residential aged care, contributing to their general well-being. This scoping review aims to provide an overview of how different technological interventions contribute to the well-being of older adult residents in aged care settings. Specifically, the current objectives for digital interventions, the interaction mechanisms, and the evaluation of their impact on well-being are reviewed following the PRISMA guidelines. We included 26 studies since 2017 covering three databases discussing the impact of technological interventions on social connectedness and cognitive and emotional well-being, and the theoretical models of evaluation applied in these studies. Seven key interaction mechanisms with digital interventions with the objective to enhance social connections, stimulate cognitive functioning, and formulate new models and theories were identified. Our findings show the potential of enhancing the well-being of aged care residents. We discuss our findings under three lenses: User, relational, and contextual experiences, and suggest that these experience categories should inform the focus of future research. This review offers insights into the broader ethical, social, and contextual factors that influence their success, and that can guide future research, inform policy decisions, and improve care practices.

Older adults are constantly challenged to keep up with the accelerating pace of technology development. Research indicates that confidence significantly influences the technology use and choices of older adults. However, there is a lack of understanding of how confidence in technology use among older adults can grow over time and what kind of support is needed to achieve this. Our research explores observable behaviour as confidence begins to develop. We collected data during weekly technology group activities at a residential care facility over 18 months, involving 15 participants. This article presents the development of the Confidence in Technology Use Framework and its subsequent validation. Using Framework Analysis, we developed the framework, consisting of three indicators that reflect older adults' growing confidence in using technology: (1) embracing proactive use of technology, (2) developing strategies to solve technology issues, and (3) striving for autonomy in technology use. The framework includes activities and feelings to explain and exemplify each indicator of confidence development. We validate the framework by aligning it with the supporting conditions of Social Learning Theory for the learning process. Our contribution is twofold. Firstly, the framework can guide practitioners in developing technology support for older adults living in residential care facilities. Secondly, the framework can help researchers identify and qualitatively evaluate confidence in technology use.

Everyday practices, including technology use, by older adults can significantly change during important life transitions. However, technologies do not always match their evolving needs. This paper examines how older adults reconfigure everyday technology use when navigating major life transitions in later life. We have engaged with fifteen participants living in residential care settings for three years in weekly group activities and individual visits. Through deep and meaningful collaborations, we got to know these residents and their life circumstances closely. We created detailed narratives of the technology use experiences of five residents applying a Narrative Inquiry approach. The narratives focused on how residents adapted their technology practices and devices over time while dealing with significant changes in their everyday lives. Then, we complemented the Narrative Inquiry with a Reflexive Thematic Analysis of the data across the fifteen residents. Our findings show that older adults developed changing technology needs for two main reasons: firstly, to cope with the immediate consequences of the transitions and secondly, to improve entering the new stage of their lives by discovering or maintaining their interests through technology. We propose exploring suitable choices for technologies with older adults that provide continuity and extend their experiences with technology use during transitions. These technologies should enable positive and enriching experiences and counterbalance unsettling feelings and the struggles of change. Our research contributes an understanding of how technologies might support the life transitions of older adults in considering both their individual experiences and the role of wider social networks.

Australian rural communities face significant climate challenges including catastrophic bushfires. In line with the UN sustainable development goals (SDGs), to build resilience in the face of bushfire threats, communities need to increase adaptive capacity while maintaining the community’s integrity. To build community resilience, they should harness the hybridity between digital technology and non-technological practices. Building community resilience is gaining attention in rural human–computer interaction to ensure those who are vulnerable to disasters strengthen their ability to address adversity even in the absence of formal government assistance. How they apply digital technology into practice to ensure it meets their needs is crucial. We outline a case study of a rural Australian bushfire-impacted community. A series of co-design workshops was conducted to understand local bushfire preparation activities and the role of digital technologies in these activities. Three creative participatory design activities supported the co-design of an early-warning bushfire system. The workshop participants co-designed and merged two solutions: first The Fire Tree, a conceptual map of a preventative information system fed and validated by the community itself; second, The People System identifies and harnesses government resources to feed and generate a rich, dynamic, and constantly updated information environment. The final solution based on the two concepts is Bushwire, a communication facilitator designed and used by participants in workshops four and five. Bushwire is a co-designed web-based collective platform that leverages citizen-science behaviours, enabling them to share local knowledge and prepare for bushfire threats. The system became a communication facilitator, a space to share detailed local information and connect; fed by locally produced elements including digital technologies, weather/road conditions, and on-the-ground instructions. This case study explores how Bushwire responds to a range of UN SDGs by seeking to build sustainable communities (SDG11), to address climate action (SDG13) for this rural Australian bush-fire-prone community, and harmonises life on land (SDG15) through multi-stakeholder partnerships (SDG17). We envisage that urban planners may derive value from listening and responding to messages from nature, and from citizen-scientists embedded in rural communities as depicted in this case study.

Demographic transitions increase the importance of finding effective technology-supported aged and community care solutions that can be used in many contexts, such as rural and urban environments. Living labs apply innovation approaches that have produced useful innovations in the aged care sector, but there are concerns about the ability to translate place-based technology innovations. Our research asked 'how can a network of aged and community care living labs provide the benefits of embedded technology innovation whilst overcoming the limitations of translation and scaling in the Australian context?'. A co-design approach with international and local living lab experts and aged care providers was used. We found that a purpose-built network and process model could overcome the issues with place-based approaches. Moreover, innovating this network could address both issues of care and viability of the sector.

Digital technology has great potential to support human health, including the complex needs of older adults in aged care services and treatments. This scoping review aims to explore the current state and roles of digital technology in supporting aged care following the PRISMA-ScR guidelines. We included 47 studies from the last 10 years covering five databases discussing the development, implementation, evaluation, or review of digital technology in aged care services and the broader clinical system. Seven key roles of digital technology were identified, including health monitoring and assessment, remote healthcare services, assistive technology to support treatment, self-care management, social technology to facilitate interaction, clinical decision support, and aged care quality measurement carried out by twelve technology types. Our findings show the potential of digital technology in enhancing the capability and efficiency of aged care services for developing or improving socio-technical aged care systems. We conclude with six recommendations for future research.

We present a qualitative study that examines how aged and community care professionals conceptualise generative AI applications, with particular attention to issues of agency, ethics, and emergent practices and behaviours. There is a growing body of research describing individual AI applications, their effectiveness and ethical implications. However, multiple applications of AI could more radically distort service boundaries and change provider practices for collaborative human-AI teams. Little is known about practitioners’ desired future roles and values for human-AI implementations and possible service innovations. Changes driven by care providers, AI service providers and government policies will have significant implications for complex settings such as aged care and community care. Through seven focus groups employing multiple qualitative methods, we identify coherence and gaps between theoretical and practitioner perspectives on the uses and implications of generative AI. Our findings suggest an urgent need for education and research to bridge theory and practical understanding of generative AI in aged and community care settings and policies to ensure marginalised groups are not locked out of future care services and models.

Keywords: living labs approach, quadruple helix, wellbeing, quintuple helix, innovation lifecycle, emerging technologies, ecosystems, co-design

Generative AI is rapidly evolving with high expectations about its potential use and benefits; however, the health and aged care sectors balance risks with gaining value from its implementation and adoption. It is also challenging for policy makers to ensure public safety without constraining innovation. In this exploratory study, we interview seven experts from Australia and internationally with a range of expertise across the Health Care ecosystem with an interest in Generative AI. We aligned our enquiry to policy, organizational, practitioner and patient views and levels of abstraction to understand the enablers and barriers to AI implementation and adoption. We found that many of the factors we identified were consistent with prior research. We understood some factors in more detail in the Australian context and further emphasized the importance of cultural perspectives, participatory design and a gap between the international policy setting and practice considerations. Based on our findings we suggest the need for co-design integration across different levels of the health and aged care innovation ecosystem within aspects of the Generative AI ‘design, develop, and deploy’ lifecycle.

Socially assistive robots (SARs) are a rapidly emerging technology that aims to augment delivery of healthcare through social engagement with patients. In recent years, numerous SARs have been developed and, to varying degrees, tested in a range of healthcare settings with promising results. Underpinning these developments have been significant advances in both artificial intelligence (AI) techniques and sensing technologies now readily available and increasingly affordable. However, despite clear technical progress and encouraging results across a range of proposed health- and well-being-related use cases, the proliferation of SARs in care-providing roles remains limited, and evidence of therapeutic benefit is scarce. In this chapter, we discuss the state of the art in SARs and identify current practical challenges impeding the translation and wide-scale integration of SAR technologies into clinical settings. We focus specifically on the question of assigned roles for SARs in care delivery, considering their potential health and well-being benefits for patients, and efficiency gains for care providers, but also identify their technical and operational limitations and the need to integrate within established healthcare systems. Drawing on existing research, including our own work exploring the use of SARs in both pediatric rehabilitation and aged-care settings, we discuss how the successful translation of SAR research and development to ongoing deployment can be realized. The discussion emphasizes the importance for a greater focus and understanding of healthcare needs, the operating context, and the relationship between these needs and the SAR's sensing and AI capabilities.

In this chapter we demonstrate how co-design can generate the knowledge needed to develop smart technologies and services in participatory ways. Even though co-design has many benefits and has been successfully used in an array of domains, it is argued that easy to apply methods are needed to guide the co-design process. One useful method for this purpose is Motivational Modelling which importantly, does not limit any aspect of participation and gives all stakeholders a strong voice in the design outcome. We report on two case studies using Motivational Modelling in the co-design process to create solutions for health and wellbeing with a focus on older adults. We argue that through the shared goal definition with attention to users’ emotions, we better understand the demands on smart solutions to create benefits for older adults and other stakeholders in complex and individual everyday contexts and hence increase acceptance and adoption.

OPINION article Front. Public Health, 24 July 2023Sec. Digital Public Health Volume 11 - 2023 | https://doi.org/10.3389/fpubh.2023.1242138

EDITORIAL article Front. Public Health, 02 May 2023Sec. Disaster and Emergency Medicine Volume 11 - 2023 | https://doi.org/10.3389/fpubh.2023.1199147

During the COVID lockdowns we moved our codesign activities, usually conducted in face-to-face workshops to online settings. We therefore created online adaptations of codesign techniques to achieve quality outputs. Fifty junior designers held virtual workshops with community participants to co-create a loneliness exhibition and a save-the-forest campaign. We argue that what we learned is of value for codesigning post lockdown. We found that online codesign broadens participation by supporting synchronous and asynchronous activities. Online participation helps those with time, mobility, or transport challenges, as they aren't limited to a single time slot or a physical venue, increasing possible participant numbers. Also, participating while isolated gave people a much-needed social connection. Our contribution demonstrates that online activities can contribute to positive, inclusive codesign evoking emotions, participation and empathy done with off-the-shelf software and people's existing technology. We propose the exploration of hybrid codesign to exploit the best of both worlds.

This paper describes the methodology applied in three co-design workshops conducted in rural Victoria, it presents the findings obtained using cultural probes by the participants and contributes to the literature related to studies conducted by HCI researchers in rural communities. The workshops’ objective was to explore the relationship that members of a rural community have with their environment and how they identify and want to communicate changes in their local environment increasing resilience in facing potentially threatening events such as bushfires. The use of cultural probes in this study is aimed at making the data collection more engaging for the participants harnessing the depth of their knowledge that is subtle and difficult to express using traditional means. The probes in the form of a journal that participants use to record how they perceive nature, ease the process of data collection with the potential to extend the activity beyond the confines of the workshop itself. This paper contributes to the literature related to HCI research, particularly the use of probes in studies conducted in rural communities. The meaningful entries produced by the participants help us to understand how they perceive their environment and the role of nature as part of their broader community, and more important, part of their lives. This knowledge based on community members’ lived experience can be applied and augmented in times of a bushfire threat.

extended-abstract Share on Weisst Du wieviel Sternlein stehen? – Building older adults' confidence in technology use through co-designing digital storytelling Authors: Lan An Swinburne Living Lab, Swinburne University of Technology, Australia Swinburne Living Lab, Swinburne University of Technology, Australia 0000-0001-6478-6506View Profile , Christel Huwald Martin Luther Homes, Australia Martin Luther Homes, Australia 0000-0001-9729-8808View Profile , Diego Muñoz Swinburne Living Lab, Swinburne University of Technology, Australia Swinburne Living Lab, Swinburne University of Technology, Australia 0000-0003-2548-1501View Profile , Sonja Pedell Swinburne Living Lab, Swinburne University of Technology, Australia Swinburne Living Lab, Swinburne University of Technology, Australia 0000-0003-3741-7777View Profile , Leon Sterling Swinburne Living Lab, Swinburne University of Technology, Australia Swinburne Living Lab, Swinburne University of Technology, Australia 0000-0002-4122-2465View Profile Authors Info & Claims CHI EA '23: Extended Abstracts of the 2023 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing SystemsApril 2023Article No.: 406Pages 1–7https://doi.org/10.1145/3544549.3573868Published:19 April 2023Publication History 0citation43DownloadsMetricsTotal Citations0Total Downloads43Last 12 Months43Last 6 weeks43 Get Citation AlertsNew Citation Alert added!This alert has been successfully added and will be sent to:You will be notified whenever a record that you have chosen has been cited.To manage your alert preferences, click on the button below.Manage my AlertsNew Citation Alert!Please log in to your account Save to BinderSave to BinderCreate a New BinderNameCancelCreateExport CitationPublisher SiteGet Access