JMIR Aging

There is growing evidence that telemedicine can improve the access to and quality of health care for nursing home residents. However, it is still unclear how to best manage and guide the implementation process to ensure long-term adoption, especially in the context of a decline in telemedicine use after the COVID-19 crisis.

Walking is important for maintaining physical and mental wellbeing in aged residential care (ARC). Walking behaviours are not well characterised in ARC due to inconsistencies in assessment methods and metrics, and limited research regarding the impact of care environment, cognition or physical function on these behaviours. It is recommended that walking behaviours in ARC are assessed using validated digital methods which can capture low volumes of walking activity.

Informal dementia caregivers are those who care for a person living with dementia (PLWD) without receiving payment (e.g., family members, friends, or other unpaid caregivers). These informal caregivers are subject to substantial mental, physical, and financial burdens. Online communities enable these caregivers to exchange caregiving strategies and communicate experiences with other caregivers whom they generally do not know in real life. Research has demonstrated the benefits of peer support in online communities, but they are limited in focusing merely on caregivers who are already online users.

During COVID-19 lockdowns older adults’ engagement in daily activities was severely affected, causing negative physical and mental health implications. Technology flourished as a means of performing daily activities in this complex situation, however, older adults often struggled to effectively use these opportunities. Despite the important role of older adults’ social environments—including their families and health professionals—in influencing their technology use, research into their unique perspectives is lacking.

The use of mobile apps has promoted physical activity levels. Recently, with an increasing number of older adults accessing the internet, app-based interventions may be feasible in older populations. Peer support–based interventions have become a common method for promoting health-related behavior change. To our knowledge, the feasibility of using digital peer support apps (DPSAs) to increase physical activity among older adults and its impact on physical activity and physical function have not been investigated.

This viewpoint article, an article that represents the opinions of the authors’, discusses the barriers of developing a patient-oriented frailty website and their potential solutions. A patient-oriented frailty website is a virtual health resource where community-dwelling older adults and their caregiver can navigate to and answer a series of health related questions and receive an automated frailty / health evaluation with a summary fit-frail score. This information can then be shared with a healthcare professionals, to help with the understanding of health status prior to acute illness, as well as to screen and identify older adult individuals for frailty. Our viewpoints were drawn from two discussion sessions comprised of caregivers and care providers, and community-dwelling older adults. Our aim is to report that barriers of a patient-oriented frailty website include but are not limited to: its inherent restrictiveness to frail persons, concerns over data privacy, time commitment worries, and the need for health / lifestyle resources in addition to a summary score. For each barrier we discuss potential solutions and caveats to those solutions, including assistance from caregivers, hosting the website from a trusted source, reducing the number of health questions that need to be answered, and resources tailored to each users’ responses, respectively. In addition to screening and identifying frail older adults, a patient-oriented frailty website will help promote healthy aging in non-frail adults, encourage aging in place, support real-time monitoring, and enable personalized and preventative care.

Because of the relationship between independent living and activities of daily living, care teams spend significant time managing assisted living residents’ toileting problems. Recently, the TrueLoo was developed as a connected toilet seat to automatically log and monitor toileting sessions.

Digital technology is a social determinant of health that affects older people’s ability to engage in health maintenance and disease prevention activities; connect with family and friends; and, more generally, age in place. Unfortunately, disparities in technology adoption and use exist among older adults compared with other age groups and are even greater among low-income older adults.

The COVID-19 pandemic has catalyzed a move from face-to-face to digital delivery of services by hospitals and primary care. However, little is known about the impact of digital transformation on organizations supporting unpaid caregivers. Since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, the value of care provided by such informal caregivers is estimated to be £111 billion (US$ 152.7 billion) in England.

Globally, cancer predominates in adults aged older than 60 years, and 70% of older adults have ≥1 chronic condition. Cancer self-management interventions can improve symptom management and confidence, but few interventions target the complex needs of older adults with cancer and multimorbidity. Despite growing evidence of digital health tools in cancer care, there is a paucity of theoretically grounded digital self-management supports for older adults. Many apps for older adults have not been co-designed with older adults to ensure that they are tailored to their specific needs, which would increase usability and uptake.

AI such as ChatGPT holds great promise to improve dementia patients’ and caregivers’ quality of life by providing high-quality responses to their questions about typical dementia behaviors. So far, however, evidence on the quality of such ChatGPT responses is limited. A few recent publications have investigated the quality of ChatGPT responses in other health conditions, however, our study is the first that used real-world questions asked by dementia caregivers themselves.

Advance care planning (ACP) is a process that involves patients expressing their personal goals, values, and future medical care preferences. Mobile applications may help facilitate this process though their use in older adults has been understudied.