Accepted for/Published in: JMIR mHealth and uHealth
Date Submitted: Feb 11, 2023
Date Accepted: Nov 6, 2023
Beyond Traditional Care: A Qualitative Study on Older Adults' Perceptions about Using Intelligent Toilet Seats
ABSTRACT
Background:
In the 21st century, Agetech (age technology) and tech devices can be an integral part of healthcare systems in increasing patient engagement, maintaining independence, and helping seniors live happier and healthier lives. Agetech can be in different forms, such as intelligent toilet seats that collect toileting logs, analyze data, and generate important insights from excreta.
Objective:
Studying how seniors use and interact with technology can help researchers, technology designers, and vendors understand the possible benefits and risks of using technology products designed to meet older adults’ needs. This study attempts to use a qualitative approach to examine the elderly opinions about using an intelligent toilet seat.
Methods:
An online interview survey was used to collect data from 174 seniors aged 65 or older. NVivo software was used to analyze and code qualitative data to classify conceptually similar themes stated by the respondents.
Results:
Regarding aging adults' opinions, five themes have been detected. The key perceived benefits and advantages are categorized into three themes: health-related benefits, technology-related advantages, and utilization-related benefits. The main perceived concerns and risks are classified into two themes: psychological concerns and technical performance risks.
Conclusions:
Older adults may consider several factors affecting the use of intelligent toilet seats in their daily life. Capitalizing on the potential benefits and reducing the possible risks may improve the older population's utilization of smart healthcare devices in everyday life.
Citation
Request queued. Please wait while the file is being generated. It may take some time.
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.