Self-Care Practices in the Context of Older Adults Living Independently

TL;DR

This study explores the diverse self-care practices of independently living older adults across multiple life domains, offering a holistic framework and design insights for assistive technologies to better support their well-being.

Contribution

It introduces a comprehensive self-care framework based on interviews with older adults, emphasizing holistic and personalized approaches often overlooked in existing research.

Findings

Self-care activities span physical, emotional, social, leisure, and spiritual domains.

Older adults prefer holistic, personalized self-care practices.

Design implications for assistive technologies to support diverse self-care needs.

Abstract

Supporting practices around self-care is crucial for enabling older adults to continue living in their own homes and ageing in place. While existing assistive technology and research concerning self-care practices have been centered on a medicalized viewpoint, it neglects a holistic perspective of older adults' preferences in self-care. This paper presents a study involving 12 older adults aged 65 and above in a semi-structured interview study, where we aimed to understand participants' practices around self-care. Our findings show that self-care in such cases involves activities across the physical, emotional and psychological, social, leisure and spiritual domains. This paper provides a comprehensive understanding of the daily self-care practices of older adults including an updated self-care framework identifying key aspects, and a set of design implications for self-care assistive technologies.