Department of Health, Faculty of Engineering, Blekinge Institute of Technology, 371 79 Karlskrona, Sweden.
Department of Health Sciences, Skövde University, 541 28 Skövde, Sweden.
Int J Environ Res Public Health. 2021 Oct 28;18(21):11332. doi: 10.3390/ijerph182111332.
The increasing use of technology by older persons and their preferences for living at home and being independent have created an avenue for self-care and care delivery using mobile technologies and health communication. This study aimed to explain how older persons with cognitive impairment experienced technology-based health communication through the use of a mobile application to facilitate a sense of coherence. Individual, semi-structured interviews with 16 participants in the SMART4MD project were conducted. The interviews were transcribed then coded deductively and thematically, creating themes that corresponded to the central components of the sense of coherence model: comprehensibility, manageability, and meaningfulness. The findings produced an overall theme: a challenging technology that can provide support, based on the three identified themes: making sense of mobile technologies, mastering mobile technologies, and the potential added value to use mobile technologies. The participants' experiences were influenced by their previous use and expectations for the application. Personal support, cognitive and physical ability, and different sources for information impacted use. The participants experienced that using the application created an ambiguity to be challenging and have possible benefits. The study suggests that the sense of coherence model may be used as a method to understand the use of technology by older populations.
老年人越来越多地使用技术，并且他们更喜欢在家中独立生活，这为使用移动技术和健康通信进行自我护理和提供护理创造了途径。本研究旨在通过使用移动应用程序来解释认知障碍的老年人如何通过技术进行健康沟通，从而促进一致性感。对 SMART4MD 项目中的 16 名参与者进行了个人、半结构化访谈。对访谈进行了转录，然后进行了演绎和主题编码，创建了与一致性感模型的核心组成部分相对应的主题：可理解性、可管理性和意义。研究结果产生了一个总体主题：一项具有挑战性的技术，可以提供支持，这基于三个已确定的主题：理解移动技术、掌握移动技术以及使用移动技术的潜在附加值。参与者的体验受到他们对应用程序的先前使用和期望的影响。个人支持、认知和身体能力以及不同的信息来源都影响了使用。参与者体验到使用该应用程序会产生模糊性，具有潜在的好处。该研究表明，一致性感模型可以用作理解老年人使用技术的一种方法。
