Digital Sovereignty of Older Citizens for a Self-Determined Use of Personal Health Records: E-Learning Design and Study Results from the EPA-Coach Project

Promoting digital literacy and digital sovereignty has become one of the key policies in Europe. Digital sovereignty has been defined as the ability to act and exercise freedom of choice in the digital world. While digital services and applications offer great opportunities for the older generations to live independently and communicate with family and friends, the digital sovereignty of citizens including older adults has become a concern of policy-makers. Hence fostering digital sovereignty has been seen as an important objective for a self-determined use of digital media including control over own data. This paper presents an approach to designing an e-learning application for senior learners, which is aimed at fostering the digital sovereignty of older citizens in using Personal Health Records (PHR) in Germany. This e-learning application, called ePA-Coach, is designed in a research project funded by the Federal German Ministry of Education and Research to offer an opportunity for citizens 65+ to acquire digital skills needed for the self-determined use of PHR. The paper presents the digital literacy framework for exercising digital sovereignty related to PHR, which was developed in the ePA-Coach project based on the European Digital Competence Framework. We describe how this framework was applied in the design of micro-learning units and combined with gamification techniques from the Octalysis framework. Finally, we outline results from two exploratory studies with older citizens which revealed strong preferences for design elements related to digital sovereignty such as choice and control of the learning progress.