Gerontechnology — the assessment of one selected technology improving the quality of life of older adults

Abstract

Older adults experience difficulties in their daily lives as their health deteriorates. Gerontechnology (the compilation of terms “gerontology” and “technology”) helps in the resolution of problems faced by older adults by improving their quality of life and, above all, developing tools to facilitate the access of older adults to all goods, services and infrastructure, which is also the understanding of the term used in this paper. The article mainly aimed to assess the selected gerontechnology that improved the quality of life of older adults in terms of different criteria, namely, innovation, demand, socioethics, usability, and functionality. It also analysed whether the respondent's age and gender had any influence on the assessment. Care robots were chosen from among the variety of gerontechnologies. The survey was conducted in the first quarter of 2018 and involved 643 people from different voivodships of Poland. Two types of questionnaires were designed. The electronic form of the survey was distributed using social media and snowball techniques, and the paper form was sent by traditional post to all nursing homes in Poland.

Keywords

• technology assessment
• gerontechnology
• humanoid robots
• older adults