Digital Coaching to Build Sustainable Wellness Routines for Young Elderly

ur focus is on digital wellness services for the “young elderly” (the 60-75 years old) age group. Wellness services will help young elderly people to improve and maintain their independence and their functional capacity. Digital coaching will help the users to build good and effective wellness routines and to sustain and develop them for better health. Potential early adopter groups are identified and the functionality of digital coaching for wellness services is worked out

Interventions to Form Wellness Routines Among Young Elderly

The ageing population of Europe is a concern for political decision makers as the ageing population by 2020 will represent very large groups of people (18-23% of the population in most EU countries). The issues raised concern elderly people, the age group 75-90 years, as their need for health and social care is expected to grow beyond what national economies can afford. Not much thought is given the “young elderly”- the age group 60-75 years – as the serious age-related problems are yet not visible among them and, hence, they are not on the political radar. Nevertheless, interventions to form and sustain wellness routines among the “young elderly” as part of preventive action programs could significantly reduce the problems society faces when people become elderly. We propose that digital wellness services on smartphones can serve as interventions to form and sustain wellness routines

Wellness Routines with Wearable Activity Trackers: A Systematic Review

With the advent of technological advancements, different types of wearables are built and introduced to individuals to better quantify and monitor their lifestyles. This helps in creating awareness among individuals about their health and wellness, motivating them to make healthy changes in their lifestyles. The young-elderly (aged 60–75) age group constitutes an important segment of the society, which is growing worldwide, but with little or no attention of researchers and practitioners. Wearables offer lots of open research avenues; with a proper integration with new and existing mobile applications it will be possible to build systematic and smart life routines for users. Designing wearables for young elderly is an interesting design challenge with its own set of requirements. We have carried out a systematic review of current literature to get an understanding of how wearables can support wellness routines for individuals. The purpose is to study the current state of art in creating wellness routines with wearables as technological interventions. In doing so we present a categorization of existing approaches and a summarization of different design recommendations that serve different design goals. The review also suggests a clear lack of efforts to address the needs of the young-elderly. We suggest an introduction of action design research to encourage users to be part of a co-creation process that would help to lower adoption barriers for the young elderly

Digital Wellness Services: Key to Better Quality of Life for Young Elderly

Digital wellness services for the “young elderly” (the 60-75 years old age group) will be interventions in their daily routines and if/when they are accepted and adopted they will help keep the young elderly in better shape for their senior years (75+). This will contribute to significant reductions in the estimated costs for health and social care for the ageing population. On an individual level, digital wellness services contribute to a better quality of life if designed to fit the needs of the young elderly. Platform tech- nology for digital services offers possible tools for intervention if the tools and services fit the requirements of the young elderly. We summarize several of our studies as a syn- thesis and work out a conceptual framework to facilitate the design and implementation of digital wellness services

Digital Support to Guide Physical Activity - Augmented Daily Routines for Young Elderly

New EU-level studies show that EU is “turning increasingly grey” and the old-age de-pendency ratio increases steadily during the next three decades. There is a growing, serious problem – people live longer lives but they are in worse shape during their final years and need growing support from health care resources. There is need for a new focus on prevention and on turning the development. The “young elderly” (the 60-75 years old age group) should adopt physical activity (PA) programs and make them part of their everyday routines. The learning processes get started through interventions with digital wellness services. DigitalWells is a research and development program to acti-vate 1000 young elderly to select and use PA programs. The goal is to keep the young elderly in better shape for their senior years (75+) and to contribute to significant reduc-tions in the growth of elderly health and social care costs

My Wellness as a Mobile App. Identifying Wellness Types among the Young Elderly

Keeping ageing people healthy and active is of major importance both on an individual and societal level. We focus on a forgotten consumer group, 60-75 year olds – the young elderly – to uncover their wellness-related attitudes, habits and goals and explore prerequisites to introduce wellness-related mobile applications as a cost-effective solution to keeping the young elderly well longer. Preliminary results on a mixed-method study of young elderly and their use of mobile applications are presented

Digital Wellness Services’ Servicescape for Young Elderly

Digital devices reshape the servicescape of wellness, helping people, e.g. young elderly, to benefit from digital wellness services (henceforth DWSs) provided in a digital servicescape. This paper builds on five prior studies and explores: (i) what requirements young elderly have, in order to benefit from DWSs, and (ii) what service providers should consider, and pay regard to, when they develop and offer DWSs to young elderly. Hence, this paper argues for DWSs to be subsets of a digital servicescape. This research developed a model for how different parties, e.g. young elderly, their friends and relatives, developers, providers, but also the society per se, could gain from the DWSs. The DWSs create opportunities for a win-win-win situation. Important for the young elderly are motivation, trust, and credibility. Important for developers and providers are to motivate the users, to create trustworthiness, to provide user guidance, and to develop through co-creation

Self-Efficacy Improves UTAUT to Describe Adoption of HealthEnhancing Physical Activity Programs

There is consensus in health studies that regular physical activities of sufficient intensity and duration contribute to better health both in the short and long term. In an ongoing research program, we focus on getting young elderly, the 60-75 years age group, to adopt and include physical activities as part of their everyday routines. Regular health-enhancing physical activities can serve as preventive health care, which will improve and sustain quality of life and build up savings in health-care macro costs for an ageing population. We have learned that digital service tools can be instrumental for the adoption and use of activity programs, and that the Unified Theory of Acceptance and Use of Technology (UTAUT) is instrumental for the acceptance and use of digital tools and services. We will argue that the UTAUT is not sufficient as such but can be enhanced to describe the adoption and use of health-enhancing physical activity programs

Wearables and Wellness for the Young Elderly - Transforming Everyday Lives?

Mobile and wearable technologies have unique advantages within health and wellness. Current knowledge on wearables shows, however, that users easily abandon them after an initial use period. We wanted to investigate whether adding a social dimension to wearable use would be valuable in the young elderly age group, and investigate user experiences of wearables when introducing them to people not in the traditional target group of fitness wearables and without previous experience of wearables. In this exploratory study aimed at gaining a holistic picture to guide further research, we utilize multiple research methods to gain rich data. We found that the young elderly had a clear interest in the wearable. Introducing a social dimension to the wearable seemed beneficial as the young elderly quickly formed a both supportive and competitive relation. The social connection formed through the device appeared to be value adding for the participants and seems to at least partially address the previously identified barriers