Social Technology: An Interdisciplinary Approach to Improving Care for Older Adults.

Population aging is a defining demographic reality of our era. It is associated with an increase in the societal burden of delivering care to older adults with chronic conditions or frailty. How to integrate global population aging and technology development to help address the growing demands for care facing many aging societies is both a challenge and an opportunity for innovation. We propose a social technology approach that promotes use of technologies to assist individuals, families, and communities to cope more effectively with the disabilities of older adults who can no longer live independently due to dementia, serious mental illness, and multiple chronic health problems. The main contributions of the social technology approach include: (1) fostering multidisciplinary collaboration among social scientists, engineers, and healthcare experts; (2) including ethical and humanistic standards in creating and evaluating innovations; (3) improving social systems through working with those who deliver, manage, and design older adult care services; (4) promoting social justice through social policy research and innovation, particularly for disadvantaged groups; (5) fostering social integration by creating age-friendly and intergenerational programs; and (6) seeking global benefit by identifying and generalizing best practices. As an emergent, experimental approach, social technology requires systematic evaluation in an iterative process to refine its relevance and uses in different local settings. By linking technological interventions to the social and cultural systems of older people, we aim to help technological advances become an organic part of the complex social world that supports and sustains care delivery to older adults in need.

Electrostatically Doped Silicon Nanowire Arrays for Multispectral Photodetectors.

Nanowires have promising applications as photodetectors with superior ability to tune absorption with morphology. Despite their high optical absorption, the quantum efficiencies of these nanowire photodetectors remain low due to difficulties in fabricating a shallow junction using traditional doping methods. As an alternative, we report nonconventional radial heterojunction photodiodes obtained by conformal coating of an indium oxide layer on silicon nanowire arrays. The indium oxide layer has a high work function which induces a strong inversion in the silicon nanowire and creates a virtual p-n junction. The resulting nanowire photodetectors show efficient carrier separation and collection, leading to an improvement of quantum efficiency up to 0.2. In addition, by controlling the nanowire radii, the spectral responses of the In2O3/Si nanowire photodetectors are tuned over several visible light wavelengths, creating a multispectral detector. Our approach is promising for the development of highly efficient wavelength-selective photodetectors.