JMIR Publications

ABSTRACT

Background:

Aging society posits new socio-economic challenges, to which a potential solution is Active and Assisted Living (AAL) technologies. Visual-based sensing systems are technologically among the most advantageous ones in providing health and social care, however, they come at the risk of violating rights to privacy. With the immersion of video-based technologies, privacy-preserving smart solutions are being developed, however, the user-acceptance research about these developments is not yet being systematized.

Objective:

With this scoping review, we aim to gain an overview of existing studies examining older adults and/or their caregivers` viewpoints on technology acceptance and privacy perceptions specifically toward video-based Active Assisted Living technology.

Methods:

A total of 22 studies were identified with a primary focus on user acceptance and privacy attitudes during a literature search of major databases. Methodological quality assessment and thematic analysis of the selected studies were executed and principal findings were summarized. PRISMA-ScR guidelines were followed on every step of this scoping review.

Results:

The results demonstrate that acceptance attitudes toward video-based active assisted living technologies are rather conditional, and are summarized into 5 main themes seen from the two end-user perspectives, caregiver and care receiver. With privacy being a major barrier to video-based AAL technologies, security and medical safety were identified as the major benefit across the studies.

Conclusions:

This review reveals a very low methodological quality of the empirical studies assessing user acceptance of video-based AAL technologies. We propose that more specific and more end-user, real-life targeting research needs to be done about the acceptance of proposed solutions.