Citizens’ Juries: When Older Adults Deliberate on the Benefits and Risks of Smart Health and Smart Homes

Abstract

: Background: Technology-enabled healthcare or smart health has provided a wealth of products and services to enable older people to monitor and manage their own health conditions at home, thereby maintaining independence, whilst also reducing healthcare costs. However, despite the growing ubiquity of smart health, innovations are often technically driven, and the older user does not often have input into design. The purpose of the current study was to facilitate a debate about the positive and negative perceptions and attitudes towards digital health technologies. Methods: We conducted citizens’ juries to enable a deliberative inquiry into the benefits and risks of smart health technologies and systems. Transcriptions of group discussions were interpreted from a perspective of life-worlds versus systems-worlds. Results: Twenty-three participants of diverse demographics contributed to the debate. Views of older people were felt to be frequently ignored by organisations implementing systems and technologies. Participants demonstrated diverse levels of digital literacy and a range of concerns about misuse of technology. Conclusion: Our interpretation contrasted the life-world of experiences, hopes, and fears with the systems-world of surveillance, efficiencies, and risks. This interpretation offers new perspectives on involving older people in co-design and governance of smart health and smart homes.

Challenges of Regional Development in the Context of Population Ageing. Analysis Based on the Example of Opolskie Voivodeship

“…The silver economy is a very broad term and comprises, among others, goods and services for elderly people, healthcare, smart living, the adaptation of houses, information and communication technologies, media, service-providing robots, solutions for mobility, recreation, fitness and wellness, care assistance, insurance, education, research and development work and even clothes and fashion [33,38,45,46]. The starting point for the recognition of the role of the silver economy as the chance for development is assuming that the process of population ageing comprises complex results whose negative impact can be limited, and which public intervention can be undertaken to address while using the achievements of scientific and technological progress [47].…”

An Iterative and Collaborative End-to-End Methodology Applied to Digital Mental Health

“…The use of data generated by personal electronic devices to monitor mental health parameters may result in useful biobehavioral markers that could in turn optimize diagnosis, treatment, and prevention and a global clinical improvement ( 14 ). This has led to the conception of all sorts of wearable devices and connected objects such as smart watches to collect data in healthy and pathological populations in a scalable unobtrusive way ( 15 , 16 ), smart textiles to collect and monitor physiological outcome measure such as in athletes ( 17 ), or smart homes to monitor biophysiological measures of older people ( 18 ). This has also led to the development of various mobile applications (linked or not to a wearable device) that monitor given behaviors or cognitions in specific populations.…”

Creating Age-Friendly Communities: Housing and Technology

“…This special issue of Healthcare on "Creating Age-Friendly Communities: Housing and Technology" is timely, comprising twelve papers [16][17][18][19][20][21][22][23][24][25][26][27] that traverse and intersect across the fields of gerontology, health and social care, social sciences and gerontechnology.…”

“…Five papers [16,17,19,20,23] take the standpoint of technology use and deployment within various social contexts as a means of contributing to the national and international discussions and debates surrounding the age-friendly landscape. Across these accepted papers, we have demonstrated the growth in multi-and-cross disciplinary research, which intersects at various disciplines across academia but also at policy levels associated with national [29] and devolved governments [30,31].…”

“…The respective authors extend their position by opening up the discussion surrounding the age-friendly environment, and the need for greater intergenerational focus, by proposing a series of recommendations and future work to expand the fields of gerontology, social science and gerontechnology. Chadborn and colleagues [20] discuss the positive and negative perceptions and attitudes towards digital health technologies. Conducting a citizen jury approach, Chadborn and colleagues were able to execute a deliberative inquiry into such benefits as well as risks surrounding smart health technologies and systems.…”