Accepted for/Published in: Journal of Medical Internet Research
Date Submitted: Jan 22, 2020
Date Accepted: Apr 30, 2020
Warning: This is an author submission that is not peer-reviewed or edited. Preprints - unless they show as "accepted" - should not be relied on to guide clinical practice or health-related behavior and should not be reported in news media as established information.
Perceptions of technologies to help community-dwelling older adults remain at home: a qualitative study
ABSTRACT
Background:
Europe’s population is aging rapidly. Most community-dwelling older adults want to stay in their homes, even those experiencing functional decline. Politicians and academics repeatedly praise technologies as the preferred solutions for helping older adults in deteriorating health to remain at home.
Objective:
To understand the perceptions of community-dwelling older adults and their informal and professional caregivers about technologies with the potential to help keep older adults living at home.
Methods:
This qualitative study used personal interviews, focus groups, and photo-elicitation interviews to better understand the perceptions of a convenience sample of 68 community-dwelling older adults, 12 informal caregivers, and 32 professional caregivers.
Results:
A fraction of community-dwelling older adults did not perceive technologies to be a very useful means of helping them remain at home. However, informal and professional caregivers were more positive. Community-dwelling older adults preferred and were more willing to adopt technologies related to their mobility, safety, and slowing down their cognitive decline. Informal caregivers preferred technological aids which assisted in the activities of daily living, as well as safety-related technologies for detecting falls and helping to locate disoriented older adults. Professional caregiver’s preferred integrated communication and information systems to improve collaboration between all stakeholders, housing equipped with technologies to manage complex care, high-performance ancillary equipment to transfer people with reduced mobility, and surveillance systems to ensure safety in the home.
Conclusions:
Although the study reports that community-dwelling older adults had limited interest in innovative technologies for helping them to remain at home, their technological skills will undoubtedly improve in the future, as will those of informal and professional caregivers. Technologies will play an ever more important role in home healthcare.
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