Reducing Loneliness and Social Isolation of Older Adults Through Voice Assistants: Literature Review and Bibliometric Analysis.

BACKGROUND: Loneliness and social isolation are major public health concerns for older adults, with severe mental and physical health consequences. New technologies may have a great impact in providing support to the daily lives of older adults and addressing the many challenges they face. In this scenario, technologies based on voice assistants (VAs) are of great interest and potential benefit in reducing loneliness and social isolation in this population, because they could overcome existing barriers with other digital technologies through easier and more natural human-computer interaction. OBJECTIVE: This study aims to investigate the use of VAs to reduce loneliness and social isolation of older adults by performing a systematic literature review and a bibliometric cluster mapping analysis. METHODS: We searched PubMed, Embase, and Scopus databases for articles that were published in the last 6 years, related to the following main topics: voice interface, VA, older adults, isolation, and loneliness. A total of 40 articles were found, of which 16 (40%) were included in this review. The included articles were then assessed through a qualitative scoring method and summarized. Finally, a bibliometric analysis was conducted using VOSviewer software (Leiden University's Centre for Science and Technology Studies). RESULTS: Of the 16 articles included in the review, only 2 (13%) were considered of poor methodological quality, whereas 9 (56%) were of medium quality and 5 (31%) were of high quality. Finally, through bibliometric analysis, 221 keywords were extracted, of which 36 (16%) were selected. The most important keywords, by number of occurrences and by total link strength; results of the analysis with the Association Strength normalization method; and default values were then presented. The final bibliometric network consisted of 36 selected keywords, which were grouped into 3 clusters related to 3 main topics (ie, VA use for social isolation among older adults, the significance of age in the context of loneliness, and the impact of sex factors on well-being). For most of the selected articles, the effect of VA on social isolation and loneliness of older adults was a minor theme. However, more investigations were done on user experience, obtaining preliminary positive results. CONCLUSIONS: Most articles on the use of VAs by older adults to reduce social isolation and loneliness focus on usability, acceptability, or user experience. Nevertheless, studies directly addressing the impact that using a VA has on the social isolation and loneliness of older adults find positive and promising results and provide important information for future research, interventions, and policy development in the field of geriatric care and technology.

Applications for oral research in microgravity - lessons learned from burning mouth syndrome and ageing studies.

The negative consequences of microgravity for the human body are central aspects of space travel that raise health problems. Altered functions of the same systems and treatment options are common points of spaceflight physiology, age-related diseases, and oral medicine. This work emphasizes the convergence of knowledge between pathophysiological changes brought on by aging, physiological reactions to microgravity exposure, and non-pharmacological and non-invasive treatment methods that can be used in spaceflight. Sarcopenia, peripheral nerves alterations, neuromotor plaque in the masticatory muscles, lingual, labial, and buccal weakness, nociplastic pain in oral mucosal diseases, and microgravity, as well as soft tissue changes and pathologies related to chewing and swallowing, corticomotor neuroplasticity of tongue, and swallowing biomechanics, are of particular interest to us. Neurologic disease and other pathologies such as recovery from post-stroke dysphagia, nociplastic pain in glossodynia, sleep bruxism, and obstructive sleep apnea have been studied and, in some cases, successfully treated with non-invasive direct and transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) methods in recent decades. An interdisciplinary team from medical specialties, engineering, and biophysics propose an exploratory study based on the parallelism of ageing and space physiology, along with experiment scenarios considering TMS and non-invasive direct methods.

Striated Muscle Evaluation Based on Velocity and Amortization Ratio of Mechanical Impulse Propagation in Simulated Microgravity Environment.

Long-duration space flight missions impose extreme physiological stress and/or changes, such as musculoskeletal function degradation, on the crew due to the microgravity exposure. A great deal of research studies have been conducted in order to understand these physiological stress influences and to provide countermeasures to minimize the observed negative effects of weightlessness exposure on musculoskeletal function. Among others, studies and experiments have been conducted in DI analogue Earth-based facilities in order to reproduce the weightlessness negative effects on the human body. This paper presents a complex muscular analysis of mechanical wave propagation in striated muscle, using MusTone, a device developed in-house at the Institute of Space Science, Romania. The data were collected during a 21-day DI campaign in order to investigate muscle fibers' behavior in longitudinal direction, after applying a mechanical impulse, taking into account two particular parameters, namely propagation velocity and amortization ratio. The parameters were determined based on the wave-propagation data collected from five points (one impact point, two distal direction points, and two proximal direction points) along the muscle fiber. By statistically analyzing propagation velocity and amortization ratio parameters, the study revealed that muscle deconditioning is time dependent, the amortization ratio is more significant in the distal direction, and the lower fibers are affected the most.

Exhaustive Description of the System Architecture and Prototype Implementation of an IoT-Based eHealth Biometric Monitoring System for Elders in Independent Living.

In this paper, we present an exhaustive description of an extensible e-Health Internet-connected embedded system, which allows the measurement of three biometric parameters: pulse rate, oxygen saturation and temperature, via several wired and wireless sensors residing to the realm of Noncommunicable Diseases (NCDs) and cognitive assessment through Choice Reaction Time (CRT) analysis. The hardware used is based on ATMEGA AVR + MySignals Hardware printed circuit board (Hardware PCB), but with multiple upgrades (including porting from ATMEGA328P to ATMEGA2560). Multiple software improvements were made (by writing high-level device drivers, text-mode and graphic-mode display driver) for increasing functionality, portability, speed, and latency. A top-level embedded application was developed and benchmarked. A custom wireless AT command firmware was developed, based on ESP8266 firmware to allow AP-mode configuration and single-command JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) data-packet pushing towards the cloud platform. All software is available in a git repository, including the measurement results. The proposed eHealth system provides with specific NCDs and cognitive views fostering the potential to exploit correlations between physiological and cognitive data and to generate predictive analysis in the field of eldercare.