Introduction

Different societies worldwide are currently facing two pervasive and irreversible trends: profound demographic shift characterised by the ageing of the population and the digitalisation of society. While these transitions pose significant challenges, they also offer valuable opportunities for the care sector and the people it serves. Digital tools can enhance monitoring, facilitate timely health interventions and foster stronger community connections, ultimately improving well-being and user satisfaction. They also open avenues for lifestyle change approaches and community engagement, creating the potential for scalable and impactful initiatives. However, potential barriers to integrating digital solutions within services such as staff time constraints and upskilling, changes in care delivery and routine, dealing with legacy digital systems and related interoperability, pose a significant threat to the adoption of technologies which may enhance patient care and facilitate more effective service delivery.

There is a need to better support services to understand their digital health transformation maturity and systematically guide them to improve on weakness to ensure appropriate, validated, user-friendly technologies can be adopted in practice engaging both staff and patients/clients to enhance care. Continuous monitoring and management of change at all levels is essential to capitalise on these opportunities while effectively mitigating risks.

In this session we would like to present contributions from researchers, policymakers and service providers from around the globe that contribute to overcoming the challenge of digitalisation of care, supporting services to develop strong user centred approaches that holistically support digital health adoption for all the actors involved (e.g. patients, families, healthcare professionals, management etc). Preference will be given to contributions which provide evidence-based outcomes covering areas such as technology development, user requirements, service design, business models or policies addressing the above.

Session promoted by the WeCareMore Centre of AIAS Bologna in collaboration with the SEURO project consortium.

Invitation for contributions

In the Special Thematic Session Embracing Change: Aging, Digitalisation, and the Future of Care we welcome presentations addressing issues related to the digitalisation of social and health care services.

Topics include, but are not limited to:

• Results of pilot studies evaluating opportunities and barriers for technology uptake in care and support services
• The development and validation of tools that help organisations to advance their adoption of technologies in practice
• Training programmes and support programmes for care providing organisations (and caregivers) in introducing digital solutions
• Technology acceptance among different stakeholder groups

Chairs

Valentina Fiordelmondo, WeCareMore Centre for Research and Innovation of AIAS Bologna, Italy, vfiordelmondo@aiasbo.it

John Gerard Dinsmore, Trinity College Dublin, Ireland, dinsmorj@tcd.ie