Customized Information and Communication Technology for Reducing Social Isolation and Loneliness Among Older Adults: Scoping Review (Preprint)

Abstract

BACKGROUND The advancements in sciences and various technologies have resulted in people having access to better healthcare, a good quality of life and better economic situations enabling humans to live longer than ever before. Research shows that problems of loneliness and social isolation are common among older adults affecting psychological and physical health. Information and communication technology (ICT) plays an important role in alleviating social isolation and loneliness OBJECTIVE Thus, the aim of this review is to explore ICT solutions and the purposes of those ICT solutions for reducing social isolation or loneliness among older adults. This study particularly focuses on customised ICT solutions that are either designed from scratch or modifications of existing off-the-shelf products catering for the needs of older adults METHODS A systematic literature review was conducted. A search across seven databases including Science Direct, Association for Computing Machinery, PubMed, IEEE Xplore, PsychINFO, Scopus and Web of Science was performed targeting ICT solutions for reducing and managing social isolation and loneliness among older adults. Articles published in English from 2010 to 2020 were extracted and analysed RESULTS From the review of 39 articles, we identified five different purposes of customised ICT solutions, focusing on reducing social isolation and/or loneliness. These are ‘social communication’, ‘social participation’, a ‘sense of belonging', ‘companionship’ and ‘feelings of being seen’. The mapping of purposes of ICT solutions with problems found among older adults indicates that increasing social communication and social participation can help to reduce social isolation problems, whereas fulfilling emotional relationships and feeling valued can reduce feelings of loneliness. In terms of customised ICT solution types, we found seven different categories: ‘social network’, ‘messaging services’, ‘video chat’, ‘virtual spaces or classrooms with messaging capabilities’, ‘robotics’, ‘games’ and ‘content creation and management’ CONCLUSIONS This review highlights the importance of discussing and managing social isolation and loneliness as different but related concepts and emphasises the need for future research to design suitable outcome measures for evaluating ICT solutions based on their solution purposes. Even though, a wide range of customised ICT solutions have been developed, future studies need to explore the recent emerging technologies like the Internet of Things and augmented or virtual reality etc., to tackle social isolation and loneliness among older people. Also, future studies should consider evaluating the appropriate outcome of social isolation or loneliness while developing customised ICT solutions to provide more robust data on the effectiveness of the solutions

Time-centric and resource-driven composition for the Internet of Things

“…4, operation ( 2) is about the composer module that takes care of identifying the necessary things according to their atomic/composite duties and users' needs. Usually, this identification is known as discovery that could benefit from potential social relations between things [29] and trust between things as well [30]. In the context of the Internet of Social Things (IoST), Atzori et al mention that models used to study social networks of humans can be extended to social networks of objects/things [20,31].…”

A Plug&Play approach for modeling and simulating applications in the era of internet of social things

“…According to Pticek et al, embracing the social wave would mean connecting everyone and everything [25]. A good review of Social IoT (not to confuse with IoST) is presented in [26]. Atzori et al consider things as intelligent objects and suggest that models are used for studying social networks of humans can be extended to social networks of objects [3,27].…”

“…According to Pticek et al., embracing the social wave would mean connecting everyone and everything [25]. A good review of Social IoT (not to confuse with IoST) is presented in [26]. Atzori et al.…”

The perks and struggles of participatory approaches: Exploring older persons’ experiences of participating in designing and developing an application

“…Still, best practice recommendations are often written from the perspective of the developers and/or researchers-not from the older person's point of view. However, among studies that in fact explore older participants' experiences, more attention is paid to the evaluation of the technological products developed, especially on collecting views related to usability aspects, and not on the participation in itself (Thangavel, et al, 2022). Undeniably, the users' understanding of the co-design process might not be equal to that of the researchers and developers (Adiemark et al, 2015).…”