Health Advances (Asynchronous Session)
Proposing Non-wearable Assistive Devices for Older Mexican Adults
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Pilar Hernández Grageda
According to the World Health Organization (WHO), the population ratio of older adults relative to the overall population is increasing and is projected to continue. This shifting ratio represents both an opportunity and a social responsibility for designers and engineers to develop technologies, interfaces, and applications that are adaptive for the capacities and limitations of older adults. These individuals may benefit from emerging technologies and intelligent devices to maintain their independence and stay at home for longer durations. This shifting demographic has also created the new field of gerontechnology as an interdisciplinary field of science for designing technology and environments to facilitate independent living and social participation for older adults. In this paper, we introduce a research project with the objective of designing and developing intelligent-assistive technology that is developmentally and culturally viable. More specifically, we explore non-wearable devices that can become part of the environment inside the homes of older Mexican adults. This device should assist older adults to live independently while maintaining positive standards of health, comfort, and safety. While our project consists of four broad stages, we present the results of the first stage (needs assessment) with specific reference to Mexican cultural aspects and supported by a literature review, participatory workshop outcomes, observation activities, and focused interviews with older adults and caregivers.
The Burdens of Isolation: Forced Isolation of the Elderly During Covid-19 View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Lucia Ann Silecchia
COVID-19 took a terrible toll on many, physically, emotionally, socially, and economically. When the world emerges from the initial throes of COVID-19 - and the responses to it - there will be time to reflect on so many decisions made and decrees issued quickly in attempts to stop the spread of COVID when it first grabbed the world’s attention in early 2020. There will be time to assess the toll that some of these actions took as many harmful consequences and side-effects are only beginning to be realized. One set of decisions made was the dramatic, near-total isolation that was imposed on elders and other vulnerable persons during this period. Those in hospitals and those living in nursing homes, assisted living communities, and other congregate settings were deprived of company and companionship for months. For purposes of this study, these facilities are referred to collectively as “congregate residential settings.” The paper focuses on what visitation restrictions meant for the well being of those in congregate residential settings physically, emotionally and spiritually. The paper argues that access to companionship is critically important and propose parameters for insuring that access to it is protected and not easily suspended in the future. The study includes a review of initiatives already proposed by the federal government and by local jurisdictions and attempt to craft a policy that respects both the need to protect against the harms of a pandemic and the harms of isolation.
Featured Unconscious Biases of Care: Wither “Respect the Elderly and Love the Young?” (Confucian Idiom) View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Lynn Yu Ling Ng
In this paper, I discuss my interview findings with various stakeholders in the care systems of Singapore and Taiwan using the theoretical resources from feminist care ethics scholarship. I analyse the narratives of care work gathered from informant groups like domestic employers of ‘migrant maids’ who provide informal home care services, family caregivers and NGO activists to contrast how childare and eldercare is treated by households in both locations. My purpose is to spark critical conservations about the hierarchies of care work in social reproduction. For example, one key question that emerges is: Why is childcare valued more highly over eldercare in feminist agendas, and what implications does the omission of eldercare by Marxist Left activism raise for Confucian cultures like Singapore and Taiwan? Using NVivo software, I conduct a qualitative open coding of twenty interviews spread across the aforementioned respondent groups. I generated the key themes based on my informants’ experiences with the care system, emphasising their word choices and quoting them where relevant. Ultimately, I find that for the quality of care provision to improve, deep structural changes at the level of individual mindsets about gendered divsios of labor in the household are necessary. At a social policy level, I suggest rethinking the sustainability of relying on ‘migrant maids’ for home care. The widespread antagonism directed at foreigners for society’s unmet care needs is misplaced. Upon closer inspection, patriarchal capitalist structures that devalue both the elderly citizenry and transient workers are what the people need to lobby against.
Changing Healthcare Services to Enable Aging in Place in Rural and Remote Regions View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Wendy Hulko, Noeman Mirza
Aging in place has long been a policy objective in Canadian healthcare, with particular concerns expressed about older adults in rural and remote regions. Health care restructuring is often linked to cost containment and reallocation of resources; this was the case with a British Columbia (BC) Ministry of Health mandated initiative that aimed to reduce hospital visits and delay admissions to long term care for older adults and was positioned as supporting aging in place. Interior Health (IH) – one of six BC health authorities – ‘repositioned’ (i.e. restructured) primary and community care to support aging in place by creating Seniors Health and Wellness Centres (SHWCs) in Kelowna, Kamloops, and Salmon Arm/Revelstoke. For their ‘transformation’ initiative, Northern Health (NH) created 26 primary care homes or inter-professional teams spread across their region in a rural distributive model. Our current research, Aging in Place in Rural and Remote Regions (APR3) is a multi-case study comparing NH’s transformation with IH’s repositioning, focusing on the extent to which each initiative supports aging in place for rural and remote older adults, and addresses their social determinants of health. We used mixed methods of data collection and analysis, including 13 key informant interviews and document analysis for NH and IH; for IH we also analyzed service usage data for the three SHWCs (n=2343) and gathered 10 service user questionnaires. In our paper, we present our case studies, discuss our preliminary findings, and indicate implications for healthcare restructuring in urban areas and rural and remote regions.
Economic and Non-economic Abuse toward Elderly in the Tlaxcala State, Mexico View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Kristiano Raccanello
In Mexico, elders cohabit with younger generations because losing independence and the need to maintain family relationships. However, unemployment and inflation as economic consequences of COVID-19, have disrupted consumption patterns as well as the economy and household relationships. The literature indicates that kins are responsible in eight out of ten episodes of violence against elderly; thus, living with relatives may be a risk factor for elders, especially when pensions represent a – and in some cases the only one – household income source. Through a random and stratified by municipalities sample of 2,956 elders (Oct-Dec 2020), of the state of Tlaxcala (Mexico), through a simultaneous equations tobit model, we analyze the relationship between economic violence (theft of valuables items, money, government pension or dispossession of real estate), and non-economic violence (physical, psychological, abandonment and mistreatment). A tobit modelling is appropriate because self-reported violence is considered as a latent variable due to the fact that persons might not declare that they are suffering violence despite of the opposite. Often, such events are not reported by elders because the fear that the situation will worsen or when perpetrators are relatives. We found a strong and significant simultaneity relationship among economic and non-economic violence, although the determinants of each kind of violence vary according to each type. Therefore, during COVID-19 elders are at risk and personal and household factors may generate self-reinforcing abuses. The Mexican government must intervene by implementing specific public policy in this regard.
