This book brings together Sociologists, Computer Scientists, Applied Scientists and Engineers to explore the design, implementation and evaluation of emerging technologies for older people. It offers an innovative and comprehensive overview, not only of the rapidly developing suite of current digital technologies and platforms, but also of perennial theoretical, methodological and ethical issues. As such, it offers support for researchers and professionals who are seeking to understand and/or promote technology use among older adults. The contributions presented here offer theoretical and methodological frameworks for understanding age-based digital inequalities, participation, digital design and socio-gerontechnology. They include ethical and practical reflections on the design and evaluation of emerging technologies for older people, as well as guidelines for ethical, participatory, professional and cross-disciplinary research and practice. In addition, they feature state-of-the-art, international empirical research on communication technologies, games, assistive technology and social media. As the first truly multidisciplinary book on technology use among ageing demographics, and intended for students, researchers, applied researchers, practitioners and professionals in a variety of fields, it will provide these readers with insights, guidelines and paradigms for practice that transcend specific technologies, and lay the groundwork for future research and new directions in innovation.

Across the life course, new forms of community, ways of keeping in contact, and practices for engaging in work, healthcare, retail, learning and leisure are evolving rapidly. This book examines how developments in smart phones, the Internet, cloud computing, and online social networking are redefining experiences and expectations around growing older in the twenty-first century. Drawing on contributions from leading commentators and researchers across the world, this book explores key themes such as caregiving, the use of social media, robotics, chronic disease and dementia management, gaming, migration, and data inheritance, to name a few.

This open access book attends to the co-creation of digital public services for ageing societies. Increasingly public services are provided in digital form; their uptake however remains well below expectations. In particular, amongst older adults the need for public services is high, while at the same time the uptake of digital services is lower than the population average. One of the reasons is that many digital public services (or e-services) do not respond well to the life worlds, use contexts and use practices of its target audiences. This book argues that when older adults are involved in the process of identifying, conceptualising, and designing digital public services, these services become more relevant and meaningful. The book describes and compares three co-creation projects that were conducted in two European cities, Bremen and Zaragoza, as part of a larger EU-funded innovation project. The first part of the book traces the origins of co-creation to three distinct domains, in which co-creation has become an equally important approach with different understandings of what it is and entails: (1) the co-production of public services, (2) the co-design of information systems and (3) the civic use of open data. The second part of the book analyses how decisions about a co-creation project’s governance structure, its scope of action, its choice of methods, its alignment with strategic policies and its embedding in existing public information infrastructures impact on the process and its results. The final part of the book identifies key challenges to co-creation and provides a more general assessment of what co-creation may achieve, where the most promising areas of application may be and where it probably does not match with the contingent requirements of digital public services. Contributing to current discourses on digital citizenship in ageing societies and user-centric design, this book is useful for researchers and practitioners interested in co-creation, public sector innovation, open government, ageing and digital technologies, citizen engagement and civic participation in socio-technical innovation.

The study of older adults and internet use has emerged as a specific area of interest which covers a wide range of topics ranging from behaviors of senior adults in information search to attitude toward the internet, to the use of the internet for personal and health issues, and to cognitive constrains of seniors in Internet use. Engaging Older Adults with Modern Technology: Internet Use and Information Access Needs takes a structured approach to the research in aging and digital technology in which older adults’ use of internet and other forms of digital technologies is studied through the lenses of cognitive functioning, motivation, and affordances of new technology. This book identifies the role and function of internet and other forms of digital technology in older adult learning. It also bridges the theories with practices in older adults’ internet/digital technology use by focusing on effective design and development of internet and other digital technologies for older adults’ learning. This title is targeted towards educators globally with an emphasis on diverse aspects in older adult and internet learning that include learner characteristics, cognition, design principles and applications.

This anthology contributes to creating awareness on how digital ageism operates in relation to the widely spread symbolic representations of old and young age around digital technologies, the (lack of) representation of diverse older individuals in the design, development, and marketing of digital technologies and in the actual algorithms and datasets that constitute them. It also shows how individuals and institutions deal with digital ageism in everyday life. In the past decades, digital technologies permeated most aspects of everyday life. With a focus on how age is represented and experienced in relation to digital technologies leading to digital ageism, digitalisation’s reinforcement of spirals of exclusion and loss of autonomy of some collectives is explored, when it could be natural for a great part of society and represent a sort of improvement. The book addresses social science students and scholars interested in everyday digital technologies, society and the power struggles about it, providing insights from different parts of the globe. By using different methods and touching upon different aspects of digital ageism and how it plays out in contemporary connected data societies, this volume will raise awareness, challenge power, initiate discussions and spur further research into this field. The Open Access version of this book, available at www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license.

This book promotes a critical reflection about the research conducted so far in Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) with older people, whose predominant perspective focuses on decline, health, and help. It introduces a new (or different) perspective, which is grounded in interdisciplinary research on older people and digital technologies. Key elements are to (i) address topics that include, but also go beyond decline, health, and help, such as leisure, fun, creativity and culture, to delve more deeply into the role of digital technologies in multiple facets of older people’s lives; (ii) focus on doing research and designing technologies with and for older adults, and their communities, to avoid and fight against negative social conceptions of ageing; and (iii) examine older people’s life course, strengths, interests, and values, as well as their limitations and needs, to design technologies that not only help but also empower them, extending their abilities and acquiring new knowledge, beyond technology use. This perspective aims to help us better understand, design, and evaluate older people’s interactions with digital technologies in the early 21st century.

The book investigates digitalisation in care for older people by giving insight into service users’ and professionals’ opportunities to digital agency in the context of European welfare states. With a focus on service users and providers experiences of digital care, the contributions address the manifold and often contradictory consequences of active ageing policies and innovation programmes. To assess digital agency of older people, ageism and co-creation in the innovation processes as well the use of digital platforms are addressed, while care professionals’ digital agency is examined through empirical cases that focus on the interaction between human and non-human actors in long-term care services, the temporality and spatiality of care, and the organisational requirements for successful implementation of digital technologies. From a variety of conceptual and theoretical viewpoints, the chapters provide a comprehensive and timely overview of ways to address the phenomena of ageing and digitalisation. The book provides critical vantage points to academic readership, health and social care professionals, policymakers, other stakeholders as well as the general audience on the effects of digitalisation in care for older people. "The Open Access version of this book, available at http://www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license. The Open Access fee was funded by University of Jyvaskyla, Finland."