EPDF and EPUB available Open Access under CC-BY-NC-ND licence. Technology is quickly becoming an integral part of care systems across the world and is frequently cited in policy discourse as pivotal for solving the ‘crisis’ in care and delivering positive outcomes. Exploring the role of technology in Europe, Canada, Australia and Japan, this book examines how technology contributes effectively to the sustainability of these different care systems, which are facing similar emergent pressures, including increased longevity, falling fertility and the consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic. It considers the challenges and opportunities of embedding technologies in care systems and the subsequent outcomes for older and disabled service users, carers and the care workforce.

Ageing is widely recognised as one of the social and economic challenges in the contemporary, globalised world, for which scientific, technological and medical solutions are continuously sought. This book proposes that science and technology also played a crucial role in the creation and transformation of the ageing society itself. Drawing on existing work on science, technology and ageing in sociology, anthropology, history of science, geography and social gerontology, Science, Technology and the Ageing Society explores the complex, interweaving relationship between expertise, scientific and technological standards and social, normatively embedded age identities. Through a series of case studies focusing on older people, science and technology, medical research about ageing and ageing-related illnesses, and the role of expertise in the management of ageing populations, Moreira challenges the idea that aging is a problem for the individual and society. Tracing the epistemic and technological infrastructures that underpin multiple of ways of aging, this timely volume is a crucial tool for undergraduate and graduate students interested in social gerontology, health and social care, sociology of aging, science and technology studies and medical sociology.

This open access book attends to the co-creation of digital public services for ageing societies. Increasingly public services are provided in digital form; their uptake however remains well below expectations. In particular, amongst older adults the need for public services is high, while at the same time the uptake of digital services is lower than the population average. One of the reasons is that many digital public services (or e-services) do not respond well to the life worlds, use contexts and use practices of its target audiences. This book argues that when older adults are involved in the process of identifying, conceptualising, and designing digital public services, these services become more relevant and meaningful. The book describes and compares three co-creation projects that were conducted in two European cities, Bremen and Zaragoza, as part of a larger EU-funded innovation project. The first part of the book traces the origins of co-creation to three distinct domains, in which co-creation has become an equally important approach with different understandings of what it is and entails: (1) the co-production of public services, (2) the co-design of information systems and (3) the civic use of open data. The second part of the book analyses how decisions about a co-creation project’s governance structure, its scope of action, its choice of methods, its alignment with strategic policies and its embedding in existing public information infrastructures impact on the process and its results. The final part of the book identifies key challenges to co-creation and provides a more general assessment of what co-creation may achieve, where the most promising areas of application may be and where it probably does not match with the contingent requirements of digital public services. Contributing to current discourses on digital citizenship in ageing societies and user-centric design, this book is useful for researchers and practitioners interested in co-creation, public sector innovation, open government, ageing and digital technologies, citizen engagement and civic participation in socio-technical innovation.

The Institute for Prospective Technological Studies (IPTS) carries out research in the field of ageing, with a focus on the role that Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) can play to promote Active Ageing. This book attempts to reflect aspects of the contribution ICT can make to quality of life for older citizens in Europe.

Demographic ageing is a reality - within 25 years half the population of Western Europe will be over 50, one quarter over 65, and the Less Developed Countries will contain one billion elderly people. Ageing Societies examines the myths, challenges and opportunities behind these figures. Ageing Societies explores three areas: § the growing necessity for extending economic activity into later life and the implications of societal ageing for the intergenerational contract and the provision of social security § the changes in modern families and the implications the changes have for the provision of support and care for the ageing population § the biggest demographic challenge of all: ageing in the Less Developed Countries where there is little or no infrastructure to provide long-term care or social security. Combining bio-demography, sociology, economics and development studies, Ageing Societies highlights the opportunities of an ageing population for a mature society. Age-integrated and flexible workforces, increased labour mobility, intergenerational integration, age equality and politically stable age-integrated societies are the potential benefits of a demography which will be with us for the majority of this century.

The booming increase of the senior population has become a social phenomenon and a challenge to our societies, and technological advances have undoubtedly contributed to improve the lives of elderly citizens in numerous aspects. In current debates on technology, however, the »human factor« is often largely ignored. The ageing individual is rather seen as a malfunctioning machine whose deficiencies must be diagnosed or as a set of limitations to be overcome by means of technological devices. This volume aims at focusing on the perspective of human beings deriving from the development and use of technology: this change of perspective - taking the human being and not technology first - may help us to become more sensitive to the ambivalences involved in the interaction between humans and technology, as well as to adapt technologies to the people that created the need for its existence, thus contributing to improve the quality of life of senior citizens.

This book aims to explore and discuss theories and technologies for the development of socially competent and culture-aware embodied conversational agents for elderly care. To tackle the challenges in ageing societies, this book was written by experts who have a background in assistive technologies for elderly care, culture-aware computing, multimodal dialogue, social robotics and synthetic agents. Chapter 1 presents a vision of an intelligent agent to illustrate the current challenges for the design and development of adaptive systems. Chapter 2 examines how notions of trust and empathy may be applied to human–robot interaction and how it can be used to create the next generation of emphatic agents, which address some of the pressing issues in multicultural ageing societies. Chapter 3 discusses multimodal machine learning as an approach to enable more effective and robust modelling technologies and to develop socially competent and culture-aware embodied conversational agents for elderly care. Chapter 4 explores the challenges associated with real-world field tests and deployments. Chapter 5 gives a short introduction to socio-cognitive language processing that describes the idea of coping with everyday language, irony, sarcasm, humor, paralinguistic information such as the physical and mental state and traits of the dialogue partner, and social aspects. This book grew out of the Shonan Meeting seminar entitled “Multimodal Agents for Ageing and Multicultural Societies” held in 2018 in Japan. Researchers and practitioners will be helped to understand the emerging field and the identification of promising approaches from a variety of disciplines such as human–computer interaction, artificial intelligence, modelling, and learning.