AGE-WELL

Objectives: The COVID-19 pandemic is having a major impact on the lives of everyone, but in particular on the health and well-being of older people. It has also disrupted the way that individuals access services and interact with one another, and physical distancing and “Stay at Home” orders have seen digital interaction become a necessity. While these restrictions have highlighted the importance of technology in everyday life, little is known about how older adults have responded to this change. Methods: Two surveys, one in 2019 and another in 2020 collected data on a combined total of 1923 older adults aged 65 years and older in Canada. These looked at how older adults think about and use technology, with the 2020 survey additionally questioning how COVID-19 has impacted their use and attitudes towards technology. Results: While older adults feel more isolated in 2020, many feel positive about the benefits of technology and have increased technology use during the pandemic to support their health, wellness, and communication needs. Discussion: The results highlight the potential of technology for supporting older adults in various aspects of healthy aging. While these results point to the opportunities afforded by technology, challenges remain, such as how social and economic factors influence technology uptake.

BACKGROUND: Fine-grained observational approaches to pain assessment (e.g. the Facial Action Coding System; FACS) are used to evaluate pain in individuals with and without dementia. These approaches are difficult to utilize in clinical settings as they require specialized training and equipment. Easy-to-use observational approaches (e.g. the Pain Assessment Checklist for Limited Ability to Communicate-II; PACSLAC-II) have been developed for clinical settings. Our goal was to compare a FACS-based fine-grained system to the PACSLAC-II in differentiating painful from non-painful states in older adults with and without dementia. METHOD: We video-recorded older long-term care residents with dementia and older adult outpatients without dementia, during a quiet baseline condition and while they took part in a physiotherapy examination designed to identify painful areas. Videos were coded using pain-related behaviours from the FACS and the PACSLAC-II. RESULTS: Both tools differentiated between painful and non-painful states, but the PACSLAC-II accounted for more variance than the FACS-based approach. Participants with dementia scored higher on the PACSLAC-II than participants without dementia. CONCLUSION: The results suggest that easy-to-use observational approaches for clinical settings are valid and that there may not be any clinically important advantages to using more resource-intensive coding approaches based on FACS. We acknowledge, as a limitation of our study, that we used as baseline a quiet condition that did not involve significant patient movement. In contrast, our pain condition involved systematic patient movement. Future research should be aimed at replicating our results using a baseline condition that involves non-painful movements. SIGNIFICANCE: Examining older adults with and without dementia, a brief observational clinical approach was found to be valid and accounted for more variance in differentiating pain-related and non-pain-related states than did a detailed time-consuming fine-grained approach.

The COVID-19 pandemic presents an unprecedented situation in which physical distancing and "stay at home" orders have increased the pressures for social isolation. Critically, certain demographic factors have been linked to increased feelings of isolation and loneliness. These at-risk groups for social isolation may be disproportionately affected by the changes and restrictions that have been implemented to prevent viral spread. In our analysis, we sought to evaluate if perceived feelings of social isolation, during the COVID-19 pandemic, was related to demographic and technology-related psychographic characteristics. Older adults across Canada were surveyed about their demographic background, their feelings concerning confidence and proficiency in technology use, and how frequently they have felt isolated during the pandemic. In total 927 responses from Canadians over 65 years old, of varying demographic characteristics were collected. Our data shows that many older adults are feeling isolated "Often" or "Some of the time" in 2020, regardless of most demographic factors that have been previously associated with increased isolation risk. However, feelings of proficiency in using technology was an important factor affecting feelings of isolation. Given that technology proficiency is a modifiable factor, and remained significant after adjustment for demographic factors, future efforts to reduce social isolation should consider training programs for older adults to improve technology confidence, especially in an increasingly digital world.

This paper presents the findings of a scoping review that maps exploratory evidence and gaps in research on information and communication technology (ICT) access and use among older persons in the Arab region. This review is part of a larger project that studies ICT access and use and related challenges faced by older adults in Qatar. A search was conducted in eleven scientific databases and search engines covering empirical studies published in English and Arabic between January 2016 and June 2021. Eleven studies were retrieved in the final corpus. A thematic analysis alongside the PRISMA for scoping reviews (PRISMA-ScR) was used to retrieve the findings. Our analysis identifies smartphones and social media applications for communication and information sharing as the most accessed and used technologies by older persons in the region. Moreover, our review highlighted the importance of the sociocultural factors in shaping ICT access and use by older persons in the region. The functional limitations of older persons in interaction with certain technology factors such as usability, functionality, and accessibility were also highlighted as major challenges inhibiting ICT access and use by this population segment. This scoping review provides a comprehensive overview of ICT access and use, and the factors affecting them among older persons in the Arab region. It highlights the scarcity of research on the subject in the region. It also stresses the fact that there is a need for more research on older persons and their caregivers in the context of the Arab world. More culturally appropriate need-based and adapted technologies are also recommended. Our review is a comprehensive source for researchers and technology developers interested in targeting and engaging older adults in the Arab region.

The demographics in the Arab world are expected to go through a change in the coming decades. It is projected that the older population in Qatar will increase. Access to and use of information communication technology (ICT) by older persons and their caregivers has rarely been discussed. This study exposes the perspectives of the policy-level stakeholders and non-profit organizations working with older persons regarding the access and use of ICT. Through focus groups, the study investigates existing services and identifies the challenges encountered within the ICT Ecosystem. The study also attempts to explore their personal perspectives toward the access and use of older persons and their caregivers to ICT Thematic analysis was employed to capture the main themes emerging from exchanges with the stakeholders. Five themes emerged to stress the importance of existing efforts, the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic, and the extent of technology acceptance. The findings revealed the extent of partnership between the different institutes when providing the different services, conducting raising awareness activities, and training campaigns, and supporting the technology acceptance. The paper concludes by providing recommendations for stakeholders on ways to address the digital gap.

with policy and practice.

Abstract Most funding programs in the AgeTech sector emphasise the involvement of the end user in research and innovation activities in order to strengthen relevance, appropriateness and real-world impact. However, this engaged approach is still a work in progress and often remains a matter of tokenism with older adults. Involving older adults is seen as key when creating ethically appropriate and inclusive AgeTech for their age group. This paper based on the reflections from members of two AgeTech groups: AGE-WELL’s Older Adults and Caregivers Advisory Committee and the Research Group of Seniors 411 in Vancouver, BC. This paper highlights some ethical problems inherent in AgeTech, particularly how ageist assumptions can be built into technology-based healthcare, including the ongoing challenges of community participation, and presents a more radical agenda of older adults at the forefront of setting research priorities and shaping the development and implementation of AgeTech. Central to this is the building of community capacity; training to facilitate older adults’ engagement in the research process: mobilizing expertise within the community to address local needs; developing mechanisms for connecting older adults and researchers in an integrated knowledge mobilization process. The paper reflects on how this approach can have a significant impact on the lives of older people, and address the digital divide that marginalizes them. Remaining challenges include how to sustain older adults’ participation in innovation initiatives, and providing hard evidence to demonstrate that a more engaged approach has tangible benefits and impact in terms of developing new products and services.

Social connectedness and participation in meaningful activities can help individuals with dementia maintain a sense of belonging, stay independent at home longer, slow cognitive decline, increase life satisfaction, and promote aging in place. However, there is a lack of consolidated resources to support individuals with dementia with the fulfillment of their social needs after a dementia diagnosis. There are some websites and online information boards to support individuals with dementia; however, the amount of information can be overwhelming because it is not adapted to their needs. The demand to increase and facilitate social connectedness for individuals with dementia encourages the development of solutions tailored to this population. The objective of this work is to develop a prototype of an online platform to Reconnect individuals with mild to moderate dementia to Life, through social Interaction and Fulfilling Experiences (rLifeTM). Using a transdisciplinary approach, a prototype was co-created based on the information provided by different stakeholders (i.e., individuals with dementia, clinicians, technicians, engineers, family caregivers, and researchers). We first identified areas for social interaction and translated them into the conception of a matching algorithm aimed at connecting individuals with dementia to personalized opportunities tailored to their needs, values and preferences. We then defined a non-profit model of operation that utilizes partnerships with dementia-focused organizations to ensure the sustainability of the platform. Future directions include developing the services offered on the platform, and designing and testing the user interface with individuals in our target population.

Adopting a transdisciplinary approach to the development of technologies to support older adults and their care partners is crucial to bridging research with policy and practice. Despite increased popularity of this approach, research evaluating transdisciplinary processes and outcomes remains limited due to an absence of evaluative tools. This presentation describes the development and validation of a new instrument: TREAT (Transdisciplinary Research Effectiveness in Aging and Technology) scale. Content areas were established through a scoping review resulting in four key themes: collaborative working practices, knowledge mobilization and exchange, integration and co-creation of knowledge, and action-oriented research. Subscale items were developed according to each theme. The overall structure, phrasing, and content validity of the TREAT were evaluated via consultation workshops with key stakeholders across Canada. Results suggest that the TREAT scale has significant potential for evaluating and improving transdisciplinary processes and outcomes for the field of aging and technology.

Effective home and community services and supports can enable older adults to successfully age-in-place, enhancing physical, mental, and social health outcomes through improved social participation, heightened independence, autonomy, and choice. One challenge in affordable housing developments for seniors surrounds the integration of place-based services. This presentation reports on four Perspectives Workshops conducted with service providers that aimed to: (i) understand challenges and opportunities experienced by service providers when delivering senior-friendly services and (ii) determine actions that can be taken to enhance the needs (e.g. staffing and financial resources) of service providers, enabling them to serve seniors more effectively. These deliberative dialogues sessions were conducted with the goal of co-creating sustainable service provision solutions for tenants transitioning into a newly built low-income seniors housing development. Results of the workshops included ideas for effective utilization of the shared amenity space, which generated resources for an on-site service delivery program.