Paternalistic rather than Assistive? Concepts and social attributions of older adults represented in Active Assisted Living technology project descriptions
U. Bechtold, L. Capari
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AbstractBackground: The promises of Active Assisted Living (AAL) are manifold: it claims that technology will relieve economic burdens and develop new markets, and that European citizens will enjoy better, healthier and more active ageing. Research aim: We ask whether these promises are merely extrinsic attributions, or if these hopes can actually be fulfilled by the introduction of AAL. To do so we identify and examine the attributions (i.e. hopes and expectations) projected onto the development of AAL applications by project teams; these attributions are likely to be operationalised throughout the project, and materialise in the technological answers the project team elaborates. Methods: We analyse all AAL project descriptions financed by the European AAL joint programme and presented as success stories on the official AAL webpage in 2016 and 2017 (The European JPI on AAL: http://www.aal-europe.eu/). The rationale behind the analysis of this sort of text is that this is where project teams present their ideas, thoughts and results in a very brief summary to the outside world and interested public. Using a combination of social network analysis and qualitative content analysis, we examined the text corpora of these 10 success stories and try to identify attributions, which we also call inherent assumptions about ageing. Results: The attributions to ageing we found were in many respects contradictory. Most of them involve a rather paternalistic view of older adults. The majority of the descriptions analysed make no reference whatsoever to the role of the user. Conclusion(s): Generating a relational dataset, we highlight possible consequences for future technology development (innovation side) and adoption (diffusion), as well as implications for technology as a way of dealing with demographic change. We conclude that market-oriented technology research and development programmes like the AAL-JP should consider being more reflective about the attributions to ageing they (necessarily) apply. One way of doing this would be to invite applicants to consciously question and express how a given technology affects older adults in more than merely economic and technological ways.Keywords: Active assisted living, AAL research policy, imagining old age, social attributions to older adults, Information and communication technology and olde
U. Bechtold, L. Capari (2019). Paternalistic rather than Assistive? Concepts and social attributions of older adults represented in Active Assisted Living technology project descriptions. Gerontechnology, 18(4), 193-205
https://doi.org/10.4017/gt.2019.18.4.001.00