Could Living Conditions affect Stress in Using Assistive Technologies?

The older population is growing, digital solutions may help people maintain inde-pendence, but different conditions may limit the use of these technologies. In this dis-cussion paper we explore the possibility that living status may affect the use of digital solutions. The “Pilots for Healthy and Active Aging” (PHArA-ON) is a large-scale pi-lots project that aims to develop an interoperable platform to provide support for Eu-rope’s ageing population, defying the conditions that affect the use of digital services, devices, and tools enhancing people’s independence, safety, and capabilities [1]. The aim of this discussion paper is to understand how the living framework may affect technostress score [2, 3] in older adults and understand if a continuous presence of the informal caregiver may affect stress and attitude to use assistive technologies. We obtained some preliminary demographic data regarding the living status of the older adults recruited in the project. We use non-parametric test to investigate the rela-tionships among the data, which are not normally distributed. Until now a total of 41 older adults were recruited in the intervention group. 43.9% are female and 56.1% male and we found no significant differences between gender and their digital skills. All users live in a house inserted into an urban environment. 22.0% of them live alone against 78.0% not living alone. 43.9% of them live with their own informal caregiver, against the other 56.1%, some of them are relatives, others consorts. The preliminary analysis shows (Fig.1A) that there could be a difference in technostress's score among older adults that live alone and those that live with another person, but due to the sample size, the differences are not statistically significant (p-value = 0.192).