Accepted for/Published in: Interactive Journal of Medical Research
Date Submitted: Dec 20, 2022
Date Accepted: Apr 30, 2023
Understanding Loneliness in Younger People: A Review on Opportunities and Challenges for Loneliness Interventions for Younger People
ABSTRACT
Background:
Loneliness is a global public health issue. Loneliness increases the risk of depression, anxiety, mental health issues and even physical conditions such as heart stroke. While loneliness is studied theoretically through psychology, sociology and from lens of social and biological sciences, there is a need to understand loneliness from the perspective of health informatics.
Objective:
This paper presents such an approach where the studies carried out from the perspective of digital health and informatics are discussed in detail. While the distribution of loneliness follows a U-shaped curve when it comes to age of the demography, the health informatics and digital health interventions mostly focus on older people. Because of the particular developmental and social dynamics of loneliness in young age the digital interventions designed for older people cannot be directly applied to younger people.
Methods:
A comprehensive overview of the understanding of loneliness and the study of overall field of tools and strategies of loneliness informatics was carried out. The need to study loneliness in younger people is then addressed and particular digital solutions and interventions which are developed for younger people are presented.
Results:
The need to have a comprehensive overview of loneliness informatics, particularly for younger people is addressed. The majority of interventions as well as reviews are focused on older people with information and communication technology (ICT) based and social media based interventions showing promise for countering the effects of loneliness. There are new technologies such as conversational agents and robots which are tailored to the particular needs of young people.
Conclusions:
This paper presents a comprehensive overview of the understanding of loneliness and the study of overall field of tools and strategies of loneliness informatics. The particular digital solutions and interventions which are developed for younger people can benefit more if they are made interactive, thus to retain the users.
Citation
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Copyright
© The authors. All rights reserved. This is a privileged document currently under peer-review/community review (or an accepted/rejected manuscript). Authors have provided JMIR Publications with an exclusive license to publish this preprint on it's website for review and ahead-of-print citation purposes only. While the final peer-reviewed paper may be licensed under a cc-by license on publication, at this stage authors and publisher expressively prohibit redistribution of this draft paper other than for review purposes.