28 Nov The Abstract Book »Digital Aid to Silver Years«

Slovenian partners of the Pharaon project have published a book of peer-reviewed scientific papers with the title Digital Aid to Silver Years: Digitalization and the PHArA-ON Project’s Contribution to Improving the Quality of Life of Older Adults. The abstract book is a result of the two-day international conference “Digital Aid to Silver Years” #Pharaonseries which was held in May in Ljubljana, Slovenia.

The main aim of the book is to show a holistic approach to dealing with an ageing population and to highlight the need for changes, on the one hand at the level of legislation, support organizations, education, personnel, cross-sectoral and interdisciplinary cooperation, and on the other hand at the level of the development and implementation of new technological solutions.

In the first section, the authors defined innovation paths for age-friendly homes, modern technologies to help the independence of older people, new approaches to care for older adults and new principles for designing spaces for older adults. The contributions theoretically reviewed the current situation in the field of design of homes for older people and organization in homes for older people, and with a view to the future, highlighted issues and challenges in this area.

The second section focuses on the Pharaon project, namely, it first presents the project itself and the pilots carried out within the project in more detail, and then presents the pilot research in Slovenia and two concrete technological solutions: the video conference system Daisy and a simple smartphone for older people, Seniors Phone.

In the third part, the authors reflect on the current challenges of caring for older people: social inclusion and physical activity as part of an age-friendly environment, ways to meet the needs of older adults in the built environment, and long-term care.

The fourth section is dedicated to the summaries of the round table entitled Are you afraid of digitalization?, where the participants discussed current challenges and issues in the field of healthy and active ageing and care for older people in institutional and home environments, and formulated guidelines on how to solve this issue in the future.

In the last two sections, good practices and related research and practices are presented. An example from Italy is presented, namely assistive technology for supporting older adults and professionals during the pandemic, a concept of congruent care from Slovenia and two examples from Croatia. In the field of education, the authors question the future of the profession of social gerontology and present two projects that mainly focus on the design of homes for older people and education on this topic – the DESIRE project and ESSENSE project. Some research on the use of assistive technologies and challenges in the field of active and healthy ageing is also presented.

Read the full abstract book “Digital Aid to silver years” here (click here)