Previously submitted to: JMIR Aging (no longer under consideration since Oct 15, 2021)
Date Submitted: Jun 9, 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Warning: This is an author submission that is not peer-reviewed or edited.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.
How Age and Health Status Impact Attitudes towards Aging and Technologies in Care: A Quantitative Study
ABSTRACT
Background:
Increasing proportions of geriatric patients and people in need of care pose tremendous challenges for the care sectors of our society. Developments regarding assisting technologies have the potential to support old people in aging and care.
Objective:
In order to reach a sustainable adoption of assisting technologies in aging and care, the perceptions and wishes of future users have to be understood. In particular, the relationships between health-related individual factors (i.e., the participants' age, current health status), and perceptions of aging and using assisting technologies in severe health situations have to be empirically examined.
Methods:
Therefore, the current online survey study (N = 585) investigates the impact of diverse future users’ age and health status on their 1) perceptions of aging, 2) perceptions and acceptance of using assisting technologies in aging and care as well as 3) end-of-life decisions with regard to technology usage.
Results:
The results revealed the health status to be more decisive for age-related perceptions compared to the chronological age, whereas technology-related perceptions (perceived barriers & acceptance) were slightly impacted by either the chronological age or health status. The end-of-life decisions (“prolong life”: (χ2(3,538)=14.36; P=.001) & “delay death”: χ2(3,537)=41.41; P=.000) showed the most striking differences in the willingness use assisting technologies, revealing old & diseased participants to have a more restrained attitude towards technology usage compared to old & healthy as well as all younger participants.
Conclusions:
The results indicate that usage of assisting technologies in private or professional aging and care contexts should be communicated and implemented tailored to the respective user group’s needs. Moreover, the results can be used to derive practical implications within the geriatric care context.
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