Ageing and Technology: Perspectives from the Social Sciences

The booming increase of the senior population has become a social phenomenon and a challenge to our societies, and technological advances have undoubtedly contributed to improve the lives of elderly citizens in numerous aspects. In current debates on technology, however, the "human factor" is often largely ignored. The ageing individual is rather seen as a malfunctioning machine whose deficiencies must be diagnosed or as a set of limitations to be overcome by means of technological devices. This volume aims at focusing on the perspective of human beings deriving from the development and use of technology: this change of perspective - taking the human being and not technology first - may help us to become more sensitive to the ambivalences involved in the interaction between humans and technology, as well as to adapt technologies to the people that created the need for its existence, thus contributing to improve the quality of life of senior citizens

Moving forward on u-healthcare: A framework for patient-centric

Delivering remote healthcare services without deteriorating the ‘patient experience’ requires building highly usable and adaptive applications. Efficient context data collection and management make possible to infer extra knowledge on the user’s situation, making easier the design of these advanced ubiquitous applications. This contribution, part of a work in progress which aims at building an operative AmI middleware, presents a generic architecture to provide u-healthcare services, to be delivered both in mobile and home environments. In particular, we address the design of the Context Management Component (CMC), the module that takes context data from the sensing layer and performs data fusion and reasoning to build an aggregated ‘context image’. We especially explain the requirements on data modelling and the functional features that are imposed to the CMC. The resulting logical multilayered architecture -composed by acquisition and fusion, inference and reasoning levels- is detailed, and the technologies needed to develop the Context Management Component are finally specifie

Ageing and Technology

The booming increase of the senior population has become a social phenomenon and a challenge to our societies, and technological advances have undoubtedly contributed to improve the lives of elderly citizens in numerous aspects. In current debates on technology, however, the »human factor« is often largely ignored. The ageing individual is rather seen as a malfunctioning machine whose deficiencies must be diagnosed or as a set of limitations to be overcome by means of technological devices. This volume aims at focusing on the perspective of human beings deriving from the development and use of technology: this change of perspective – taking the human being and not technology first – may help us to become more sensitive to the ambivalences involved in the interaction between humans and technology, as well as to adapt technologies to the people that created the need for its existence, thus contributing to improve the quality of life of senior citizens

Debunking the Myth of Civil Rights Liberalism: Visions of Racial Justice in the Thought of T. Thomas Fortune, 1880-1890

n recent years, the supposed achievements of the American civil rights movement have come under attack as part of a critique of the ideology of legal liberalism. That critique argues that civil rights lawyers and other activists too greatly emphasized court-focused strategies aimed at achieving what would turn out to be pyrrhic civil rights victories - i.e., gains solely in formal equality in requirements enshrined in law as to how the state should treat its citizens. This critique of legal liberalism is well deserved insofar as it is aimed at a tendency within legal academia to extol the virtues of the American legal system, especially the U.S. Supreme Court\u27s allegedly laudable protection of civil and political rights. But in this Article I argue such critiques of legal liberalism should not be allowed to bleed into evaluations of the goals of the civil rights movement itself, especially when taking a long view on the movement for racial justice. I seek to promote taking such a long view of the movement for racial justice by evaluating the legal liberal critique of that movement in relation to an important early leader: T. Thomas Fortune, a law-educated militant journalist, public intellectual and organizer. In 1887, Fortune founded the Afro-American League, a national organization that was short-lived but nevertheless played an important historical role in the transmission of ideas to later groups including the Afro-American Council, the Niagara Movement, and the NAACP. Fortune\u27s multi-dimensional view of the struggle for racial justice embraced a number of ideas we tend to see as distinct or even opposing today. Fortune supported reactive court battles and proactive legislative reform, establishment of equal civil and political rights and an ultimate goal of economic justice, intra-race self-help and interracial coalition politics aimed at eliminating poverty for all persons regardless of race. Examining Fortune\u27s ideas helps remind us that the history of the civil rights movement was more complex and multidimensional than the contemporary legal-liberal gloss remembers today

Active and Assisted Living, a Practice for the Ageing Population and People with Cognitive Disabilities: An Architectural Perspective.

The current digital revolution is causing a paradigm shift encompassing all environments in which human beings conduct their daily activities. Technology is starting to govern the world, gradually modifying not only individual and social behaviour, but also ways of living. The necessary adaptation to new information and communication technologies forces societies to rethink both public and private spaces, in which evolution is slower than rapid social transformation. As part of this change, the concept of Active Assisted Living (AAL) has developed. Assisted spaces can be designed to provide older adults, carers, or people who have cognitive disabilities, such as Alzheimer’s disease or other dementias, with a healthier, safer, and more comfortable life, while also affording them greater personal autonomy. AAL aims to improve people’s quality of life and allow them to remain in their own homes for as long as possible, not in residences. This study conducted a critical review about AAL from an architectural point of view. The research adopted a qualitative approach in which we collected the studies during the last twenty years, then used descriptive, narrative and critical analysis methods. Based on these, this paper aims to explain this new technological paradigm, its characteristics, its main development trends, and its implementation limitations. The results obtained show how the development of AAL will be in the next ten years, and how this concept, and its application, can influence architecture and provide the bases for further research into the design of buildings and citiesPartial funding for open access charge: Universidad de Málag

Assistant without Master? Some Conceptual Implications of Assistive Robotics in Health Care

The subject of “technical assistants” in inpatient care is currently being widely discussed in scientific and public circles. In many cases, though, it has become apparent that the umbrella term “assistive technologies”, also in the context of robotics, is very contrived. Against this background, the authors of this article reflect on the meaning of “assistance” in socio-technical systems, and critically review its relevance. To understand and demonstrate “assistive” functions, it is essential to establish a frame of reference. The re-evaluation of an empirical study of people with dementia in inpatient care has revealed the functional character of technical assistance systems. The results, however, show that the theoretical debate on the social and organisational function of “assistance” in these technical fields is still lacking. Therefore, the reflections in this paper may also provide some starting points for this debate