Project Overview

Older adults value autonomy and independence as key features of healthy aging. Most research to date has focused on maintaining autonomy and independence in community; less attention has been placed on understanding how to maintain autonomy and independence when ‘home’ is an institutional setting such as long-term care, or within home support programs. The goal of Living More with SMART Technology (LivMoreSMARTech) is to support technology development that improves the independence, functioning, wellbeing and quality of life of older adults in continuing care while remaining affordable and not labour intensive. Our aims are: 1) to understand the lived experience, needs and desires for well-being among older adults with complex conditions in continuing care; 2) to implement and evaluate off-the-shelf technology solutions, individually customized to maximize well-being, that are supported and sustainable; and 3) to understand how best to incorporate sustainable, person-centred technology solutions into continuing care settings that result in scalable outcomes including adoption into organizational policies, procedures, programs and care planning. LivMoreSMARTech takes a person-centred co-design approach to achieve its objectives, and utilizes the action research cycle of planning, acting, evaluating and reflecting in order to continuously refine our understanding of the research problem.