A Literature Review on Information Systems Supporting the Physical Wellbeing of Elderly People

TL;DR

This literature review analyzes multidisciplinary research on information systems aimed at enhancing the physical wellbeing of elderly people, highlighting current focus areas and proposing future research directions.

Contribution

It systematically reviews 62 publications on information systems for elderly wellbeing, classifies them, and identifies gaps, especially the focus on disease treatment over prevention and health promotion.

Findings

Research mainly focuses on disease treatment and medical procedures.

Limited emphasis on prevention, education, and health promotion.

Proposes a new research agenda for holistic elderly wellbeing.

Abstract

This paper reviews multi-disciplinary research on information systems supporting the physical wellbeing of the elderly population. By taking a systematic approach, it screens journals, conference proceedings and books on how computer-based systems are used for improving both the health and wellbeing of the most senior individuals. By using different Internet-databases indexing academic publications and a set of conceptual keywords the authors searched for and identified 62 major publications on the topic that were carefully reviewed. Each publication item was classified according different category sets and the aggregated data was then analyzed from different socio-technological perspectives. Our findings suggest that research on the topic is very focused on diseases over health and wellbeing, since most of the studied information systems focused much more on the protective and curative medical procedures over other important dimensions such as prevention, education and health promotion. An overview on what and where the studied systems are used is presented and a new information systems research agenda is proposed.