Special Session

  • Meaningful Technology for Seniors
    • (Session organizer: Kentaro Watanabe, Marketta Niemelä, Marja Toivonen)

    The topic of this session is how to design, develop and implement meaningful technologies for seniors in their daily lives and care service environments. Our society is facing the challenges of aging population. While technologies such as ICT and robotics are being highly anticipated to tackle these challenges, there seems still some gap between such expectation and actual products or their usage. To realize meaningful technologies for seniors, it is important to review the daily lives of seniors at home or care facilities from the service system perspective which consists of stakeholders such as families, caregivers and municipalities, and then to specify the role and position of technologies in the service system. The active participation of these stakeholders in designing technologies and their usage is also needed to develop and implement them in care service systems. We welcome both theoretical and empirical papers concerning this topic.

    More special sessions to be added.