Accepted for/Published in: JMIR Aging
Date Submitted: Sep 29, 2025
Open Peer Review Period: Oct 28, 2025 - Dec 23, 2025
Date Accepted: Feb 9, 2026
(closed for review but you can still tweet)
Warning: This is an author submission that is not peer-reviewed or edited.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.
Exploring Older Adults' Attitudes Towards Smart Elderly Care Services: Evidences from Digital Dinning Assistance Services in China
ABSTRACT
Background:
Despite rapid technological advancement, digital elderly care services have yet to achieve widespread acceptance among older adults, underscoring the imperative to identify the factors influencing their adoption.
Objective:
This study employs digital meal assistance services as a representative case to analyze the determinants of low adoption rates through the theoretical lens of behavioral attitudes.
Methods:
Utilizing survey data from 1,019 individuals aged 60 and above, this research applies exploratory factor analysis (EFA) to delineate the structure of attitudes, complemented by Logit models to empirically verify their impact on service usage.
Results:
Behavioral attitudes were conceptualized across five dimensions: burden reduction, convenience facilitation, service acceptance, digital trust, and funding sources. Findings indicate that older adults prioritize the potential of these services to alleviate care burdens on their children. Notably, while low-income older adults recognize the value proposition, they demonstrate the lowest levels of trust.
Conclusions:
The study concludes that attitudinal variances are a significant contributor to the intention-behavior gap in digital service adoption. Consequently, digital meal assistance should be viewed as complementary to, rather than a replacement for, traditional support models. Policy interventions should prioritize trust-building and burden reduction strategies. Clinical Trial: there is no trial in the paper
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.