了解銀髮族健康共創實踐與傳播資訊科技輔助需求

Instead of grounding in the approach of pathogenesis, this proposal emphasizes the importance of “salutogenesis,” which deals with how older adults actively embrace their older adulthood. Aging is a natural process and how to cope with aging should be decided by older adults rather than relying on ad hoc benchmarks. It is important to understand how older adults devote themselves into maintaining, or even improving the quality of life so as to reach health and well-being. In other words, the definitions and forms of healthy aging should be determined by older adults. Salutogenesis encourages older adults to actively engage and involve one another in various activities, as they contribute to health. Maintaining health not only relies on individual efforts but also social support from the community network. In addition to community, the practices of health coproductions take place in family. Family members care for and pay attention to one another. During the process, they maintain an awareness about one another’s health status and encourage one another to engage in healthy behaviors. This proposal focuses on such reciprocal health coproduction in community and in family to investigate how older adults coproduce with different partners and what kinds of activities they do for health. In contrast to pathogenesis, salutogenesis treats older adults as agentic and active actors who have rich knowledge and skills to contribute. Therefore, aging is not a passive process where older adults wait for others’ care, nor a deficit that needs to ameliorate. Health maintenance is an intragenerational and intergenerational collaborative results; older adults actively participate to stay healthy and delay aging. Due to the shift in demographic structure with rising aging rate and reducing birth rate, it is not feasible and scalable to rely on the younger generation to take care of the older generation. The focus of this research proposal is health coproduction practices; therefore, at the first stage of the study, our research participants are mainly healthy/sub-healthy older adults who dwell in urban communities. Qualitative interviews and observations are used to study this group of participants. We hope that the research results can provide an understanding of how active health coproduction looks like in Taiwan. With this research, it is our hope that we can expand the community support network and tighten the family bonds so that the older adults can better utilize and access resources. In order to deal with aging in a smarter and more interactive way, the research results will be used to inform technological designs that facilitate older adults to engage in coproduction activities in both community and family. Based on the results, we also aim at providing practical suggestions for public health policy on how to customize community facilities and enrich long-term care needs.