Over 60 - (r)evolution of technology use among Bulgarian participants in project SAAM
Abstract
Project SAAM (Supporting Active Ageing through Multimodal coaching) aimed at providing new methods supporting Europe’s ageing population to remain active and live independently at home for as long as possible. This article presents the case study of designing the SAAM system for and and testing it together with seniors, sharing the experience from Bulgaria. The article particularly focuses on project results in the area of technology uptake among seniors. SAAM proved to be a system with significant potential to meet seniors’ active ageing needs, because of its high level of personalisation. On the other hand, most Bulgarian seniors participating in the project managed to adapt to having the SAAM system present in their lives regardless of their previous experience with technologies or lack thereof. Thus, SAAM contributed to answering some of the open questions in the field of active ageing. Still, observing the interplay between the complex and multi-domain system’s functioning and seniors’ experience with it inevitably raised new questions to be answered in the future;
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