Understanding the Influencing Factors and Mechanism of Social Compensation for Chinese Older Adults Using Social Media in the Context of Smart Home: A Qualitative Analysis

As a new generation of necessary terminals for future homes, smart homes have become one of the essential mediums for smart aging at home. This paper aims to explore how older adults who age at home can overcome the digital divide of the new medium and achieve social participation in the home context to realize active aging. Based on the theory of social compensation, we select the smart-home smart screen, a representative new medium product in China, and carry out open coding, spindle coding, selective coding, and theoretical construction of the original interview data through the grounded theory research method. The results show that the main factors affecting the social compensation of older adults to smart home social media include user interface quality, interaction quality, content quality, and service quality, and these four factors are used as external variables to compensate older adults socially, thereby stimulating the emotional experience and perception changes at the cognitive level of older adults and then affecting the adoption and acceptance of smart home social media by older adults. This study refines the factors influencing the older adults' use of smart home social media from the perspective of social compensation. It explains the mechanism of acceptable behavior of older adults, bridging the gap in previous literature on the influencing factors and behavioral mechanisms of older adults of smart home social media. This paper provides a theoretical basis and guidance for the subsequent academic research and software development practice of social media under new technological devices to further help older adults in China achieve active and healthy aging

Future bathroom: A study of user-centred design principles affecting usability, safety and satisfaction in bathrooms for people living with disabilities

Research and development work relating to assistive technology 2010-11 (Department of Health) Presented to Parliament pursuant to Section 22 of the Chronically Sick and Disabled Persons Act 197

Energy Monitoring through Social Networks

Social networks play a significant role nowadays in changing people's behaviours. However, this is a fact of which only few of the energy monitoring system manufacturers have taken advantage. This thesis explores the use of social networking in monitoring and modifying household energy use. The results of this study indicate that providing real-time feedback reduces the energy usage of the consumers and further reductions in energy consumption can be gained by involving the consumers in a competition to keep overall consumption down. Also, they indicated that there might be a correlation between strong affinity and social relations among members of a community and the speed of change in people's conservation behaviour. This research contributes to a greater understanding of people's conservation behaviour. It is a part of a larger project (iDSLM project) aimed at providing techniques to better manage domestic electricity consumption without overtly affecting quality of life; this project involved developing a monitoring system on the Facebook platform to evaluate the influence of both real-time feedback and competition on changing consumers’ conservation behaviour (University of Waikato, 2011-2012)