Creating a Social Learning Environment for and by Older Adults in the Use and Adoption of Smartphone Technology to Age in Place

Abstract

Smartphone technologies can support older adults in their daily lives as they age in place at home. However, they may struggle to use these technologies which impacts acceptance, adoption, and sustainable use. Peer to peer community learning has the potential to support older adults to learn using (smartphone) technologies. This paper studies such a learning community approach and how it can support older adults to learn using and adopt the smartphone application GoLivePhone. This technology assists older adults in their daily living by supporting them through fall detection and activity tracking. In particular, the interface of this application can evolve and adapt as older adults become more knowledgeable during the use process or as their abilities change. This paper shows a field study with seven older adults learning and using the GoLivePhone technology through a living lab approach. These older adults participated in this research in a technology learning community that was set-up for research purposes. For this we used ordinary Samsung A3 smartphones with the simplified GoLivePhone software, particularly designed for older adults. At the end of the learning class we conducted an additional focus group to both explore factors facilitating older adults to learn using this technology and to identify their main personal drivers and motivators to start and adopt this technology. We collected qualitative data via open questions and audio recording during the focus group. This collected data was subject to a thematic analysis, coding was primarily performed by the first author, and reviewed by the other authors. We provide insights into how peer to peer community learning can contribute, and found both super-users and recall tools to be helpful to support sustainable use of smartphone technology to support older adults to age in place.

Educational Concepts of Digital Competence Development for Older Adults—A Scoping Review

“…Basic skills-general functions and features, device set up [14,19,28,32,34,39,40,46,50,53,56] Communication [3,14,19,28,32,34,40,46,50] Social media [28,32,39,40,47,50,53] e-Health, health information and services [3,14,28,34,41,43,44,53,54] Internet browsing [14,19,28,32,50] e-Entertainment [14,32,34,39,53] Online banking and shopping [14,19,32] Cybersecurity [19,28,40,…”

Activity-friendly environments for active aging: The physical, social, and technology environments

“…To prevent unequal access to these services and tools, it is crucial to develop simple and intuitive solutions. This requires participatory research in collaboration with individuals with limited digital skills and businesses willing to invest their time and resources to improve accessibility by diverse end-users including older adults ( 38 ).…”

Strategies to Help Elderly Learning Technology in Malaysia: A Focus Group Study

“…When teaching the elders, structured learning or step-by-step learning is one of the preferred methods of instruction, as it provides educational content to the learners, thus easing the learning process for the learners (Pappas et al, 2019). Research conducted by Haan et al (2021) found that the elderly leaned more and preferred learning through the step-bystep process and that the elders too considered the particular learning process as a crucial method for their learning session. The step-by-step learning process has also been identified by previous researchers as an instructional strategy that can help the elders to learn faster and more effectively (Hickman et al, 2007;Haan et al, 2021).…”

“…Research conducted by Haan et al (2021) found that the elderly leaned more and preferred learning through the step-bystep process and that the elders too considered the particular learning process as a crucial method for their learning session. The step-by-step learning process has also been identified by previous researchers as an instructional strategy that can help the elders to learn faster and more effectively (Hickman et al, 2007;Haan et al, 2021). P6: "through my observation, elderly people are actually very structured, and we should never change their structure."…”