With advances in technology, wireless and sensor technologies represent a method for continuously recording people's biomedical signals, which may enhance the diagnosis and treatment of users' everyday health conditions. These technologies mostly target older adults. In this study, we examine a smart clothing system targeting clinically high-risk patients, including older adults with cardiovascular disease (31 outpatients) and older adults in general (81 participants), to obtain an understanding of the patients' perception of using wearable healthcare technologies. Given that technology anxiety has been shown to affect users' resistance to using new technology and that perceived ubiquity is considered a characteristic of wearable devices and other mobile wireless technologies, we included three external variables: i.e., technology anxiety, perceived ubiquity, and resistance to change, in addition to the traditional components of the technology acceptance model (TAM). The results of the hypothesized model showed that among older adults in general, technology anxiety had a negative effect on the perceived ease of use and perceived ubiquity. The perceived ubiquity construct affects both user groups' perceived ease of use and perceived usefulness of wearing smart clothes. Most relationships among the original constructs of the TAM were validated in older adults in general. Interestingly, we found that perceived usefulness had an indirect effect on behavioral intention through attitude. These results further confirm the validity of the extended TAM in determining older users' technology acceptance behavior.

Seismocardiogram (SCG) or mechanocardiography is a noninvasive cardiac diagnostic method; however, previous studies used only a single sensor to detect cardiac mechanical activities that will not be able to identify location-specific feature points in a cardiac cycle corresponding to the four valvular auscultation locations. In this study, a multichannel SCG spectrum measurement system was proposed and examined for cardiac activity monitoring to overcome problems like, position dependency, time delay, and signal attenuation, occurring in traditional single-channel SCG systems. ECG and multichannel SCG signals were simultaneously recorded in 25 healthy subjects. Cardiac echocardiography was conducted at the same time. SCG traces were analyzed and compared with echocardiographic images for feature point identification. Fifteen feature points were identified in the corresponding SCG traces. Among them, six feature points, including left ventricular lateral wall contraction peak velocity, septal wall contraction peak velocity, transaortic peak flow, transpulmonary peak flow, transmitral ventricular relaxation flow, and transmitral atrial contraction flow were identified. These new feature points were not observed in previous studies because the single-channel SCG could not detect the location-specific signals from other locations due to time delay and signal attenuation. As the results, the multichannel SCG spectrum measurement system can record the corresponding cardiac mechanical activities with location-specific SCG signals and six new feature points were identified with the system. This new modality may help clinical diagnoses of valvular heart diseases and heart failure in the future.

Body posture and activity are important indices for assessing health and quality of life, especially for elderly people. Therefore, an easily wearable device or instrumented garment would be valuable for monitoring elderly people’s postures and activities to facilitate healthy aging. In particular, such devices should be accepted by elderly people so that they are willing to wear it all the time. This paper presents the design and development of a novel, textile-based, intelligent wearable vest for real-time posture monitoring and emergency warnings. The vest provides a highly portable and low-cost solution that can be used both indoors and outdoors in order to provide long-term care at home, including health promotion, healthy aging assessments, and health abnormality alerts. The usability of the system was verified using a technology acceptance model-based study of 50 elderly people. The results indicated that although elderly people are anxious about some newly developed wearable technologies, they look forward to wearing this instrumented posture-monitoring vest in the future.

In this work, a wearable smart clothing system for cardiac health monitoring with a multi-channel mechanocardiogram (MCG) has been developed to predict the myo-cardiac left ventricular ejection fraction (LVEF) function and to provide early risk warnings to the subjects. In this paper, the realization of the core of this system, i.e., the Cardiac Health Assessment and Monitoring Platform (CHAMP), with respect to its hardware, firmware, and wireless design features, is presented. The feature values from the CHAMP system have been correlated with myo-cardiac functions obtained from actual heart failure (HF) patients. The usability of this MCG-based cardiac health monitoring smart clothing system has also been evaluated with technology acceptance model (TAM) analysis and the results indicate that the subject shows a positive attitude toward using this wearable MCG-based cardiac health monitoring and early warning system.

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The use of the Internet and social applications has many benefits for the elderly, but numerous investigations have shown that the elderly do not perceive online social networks as a friendly social environment. Therefore, TreeIt, a social application specifically designed for the elderly, was developed for this study. In the TreeIt application, seven mechanisms promoting social interaction were designed to allow older adults to use social networking sites (SNSs) to increase social connection, maintain the intensity of social connections and strengthen social experience. This study’s main objective was to investigate how user interface design affects older people’s intention and attitude related to using SNSs. Fourteen user interface evaluation heuristics proposed by Zhang et al. were adopted as the criteria to assess user interface usability and further grouped into three categories: system support, user interface design and navigation. The technology acceptance model was adopted to assess older people’s intention and attitude related to using SNSs. One hundred and one elderly persons were enrolled in this study as subjects, and the results showed that all of the hypotheses proposed in this study were valid: system support and perceived usefulness had a significant effect on behavioral intention; user interface design and perceived ease of use were positively correlated with perceived usefulness; and navigation exerted an influence on perceived ease of use. The results of this study are valuable for the future development of social applications for the elderly.

For promoting the successful aging of elderly residents of Chang Gung Silver Village in Taiwan, five interactive exergames were developed to promote the well-being of the elderly. The exergames included both physical games and cognitive games, and were implemented using various computer-based technologies in the Chang Gung Silver Village. The exergames were trialed by 39 elderly residents (15 male, 24 female; mean age 79.5 ± 17.5 years) of Chang Gung Silver Village. Following the trials, the participants were requested to complete a Technology Acceptance Model 2 (TAM2) questionnaire. The results showed that the perceived playfulness and perceived usefulness of the exergames were significantly related to the users’ usage behavior and intention to use for both the physical games and the cognitive games. However, a relationship between the output quality of the game and the usage behavior was apparent only in the case of the cognitive exergames. Finally, the impact of social influence on the intention to use and the usage behavior was more pronounced for the physical exergames. Overall, the results revealed that the acceptance of exergames by the elderly depends not so much on the awareness of fun in using the game, but the perceived usefulness of the related physical and cognitive abilities.