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COBALT: Challenging obstacles and barriers to assistive living technologies

Article in Gerontechnology · June 2012

DOI: 10.4017/gt.2012.11.02.426.00

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 Tr a c k : C o m m u n i c a t i o n -M a n a g e m e n t - G o v e r n a n c e
Pre s e n t a t i o n: Obstacles and barriers to assistive living

A.J. ASTELL, E.A. WILLIAMS, F. HWANG, M. NORTON, T. ADLAM, K. LETHBRIDGE, D.WRIGHT, S. HARNEY-
LEVINE, M. ELLIS. COBALT: Challenging obstacles and barriers to assistive living technologies.
Gerontechnology 2012;11(2):151; doi:10.4017/gt.2012.11.02.426.00 Purpose COBALT is a new
project aimed at understanding obstacles and barriers to adoption of assistive living technologies
(ALT) by older adults and to develop new ways to overcome them and facilitate working with
the ALT-industry. This paper reports the first stage of the COBALT project developing novel ap-
proaches to engaging with older adults about technology. Method Twenty-nine adults aged 65
years and over were recruited to participate. Fourteen (two groups of seven) had previously par-
ticipated in a project to develop novel technology (NANA: Novel Assessment of Nutrition and
Ageing) and were recruited on that basis. The other 15 (one group of eight and one of seven)
were naïve participants who were interested in sharing their views about technology. Each group
participated in a two-hour activity session, two groups being held in Sheffield (N.E. England) and
two in St. Andrews (N.E. Scotland). The sessions for the two groups of NANA participants com-
prised one hour describing NANA and demonstrating the features of it to new users. The second
hour involved ‘show and tell’, an activity we developed especially for these groups in which the
participants are asked to bring a technology they love and a technology they have abandoned
and share these with the group. The sessions for the two groups of naïve participants comprised
one hour of show-and-tell and one hour working in pairs developing and delivering a brief pitch
to the rest of the group about a technology they selected from a selection supplied by the re-
searchers. Results & Discussion The four group sessions yielded large amounts of data from the
older adults about how they approach and view technology. The show-and-tell activity was par-
ticularly illuminating as a means of gathering information about the features that older people
like and what is important to them in making decisions about purchasing and keeping technol-
ogy. The sessions with the participants who had previously participated in the NANA project
were useful for understanding the ways they had learnt to use the novel technology, what infor-
mation they had retained, and what they emphasised in explaining the system to a new user. The
‘pitching’ activity provided similar information about how people learn to use a new technology
and what features they focus on when explaining it to another person. These data will inform the
next stage of COBALT where older adults will work collaboratively with the researchers to de-
velop materials for educating the ALT industry.
Keywords: communication, touch screen, added value, acceptance, dementia
Affiliation: University of St. Andrews, St. Andrews, Scotland, UK; E: aja3@st-and.ac.uk
Full paper: No

2012 151 Vol. 11 No 2

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