Aging, Technology and Health

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• VedranMartinez Sun Feb 09 2020

  Zrinka Loncaric: Review of the book "Aging, Technology and Health"

  The book "Aging, Technology and Health" is a collection of 11 scientific papers written by 32 authors, that the editors Richard Pak from Clemson University, Clemson, SC, United States and Anne Collins McLaughlin from North Carolina State University, Raleigh, NC, United States selected and included into this extraordinary book published in Year 2018. Book was published by a leading publisher of scientific books - Academic Press, part of the publishing house Elsevier, in English and has not been translated neither into Croatian nor Slovenian. As the book is a collection of scientific papers by renowned scientists from universities around the world, the book provides a global overview of the state of technology use in healthy and active aging, and the selected papers also outline (each in a different field of human activity) what areas of technology are yet to be scientifically explored and to verify, and in what direction (according to current knowledge) the further development of technology could and should go in order to make best use of the capabilities of current technologies. With the aging of the population (which is a global phenomenon in the world), the topic of technology use in healthy and active aging has become one of the leading topics in the health scientific community in recent years, and as it includes technological areas, we can say that the book deals with multidicsiplinically interesting scientifically relevant topic. To whom is the book intended? The book is primarily intended for students of social gerontology at the master's and doctoral levels of education, as it covers a very wide range of areas where the impact of aging is noticeable: social contacts, social integration, loss of cognitive function, age-related changes in attention, memory, spatial cognition, perception and executive function, with which older people meet. Scientific papers published in the book encourage readers to think and practical application of the technology described in the book in the way that it has not been applied so far. Since the current state of the research is presented in the selected scientific papers (and the book is barely more than a year old and we can consider it current), numerous possibilities for students to choose topics for further scientific research are opened. Due to the timeliness of the topic, book "Aging, Technology and Health" process, great interest for its publication under Academic Press label was expected. Each chapter of the book is written with an approach suitable to his topic, which means that when discussing topics that are not so common (virtual reality and augmented reality), examples are given to explain in a simple way and in a dictionary understandable to all readers the concepts that some readers meet for the first time. The overall approach to the use of technology in healthy and active aging is uniform throughout the book. The language and vocabulary used in the selected professional papers are easy to read and understand. The concepts that the reader may meet first time (especially in the augmented reality chapter, which is a fairly new technology that is just emerging) are very well explained, and their definitions are made, so it's easy to adopt and understand how they are works. A relatively small number of abbreviations (VR, AR, MCI, AD, MTL, RCT, HCI, MMI ...) appear throughout the book, and the abbreviations are explained on first use. The number of abbreviations in each chapter is even smaller and does not represent a significant obstacle to reading the book, but in any case it would be good to write the full term with the abbreviation in italics. As the book does not deal with the technical details of the used technologies, there are no problems in the book with the names of units or their compliance with international standards (SI system). The scientific contribution of the book is reflected in presenting the current state of technology development to support healthy and active aging, as well as directing scientists to areas that are yet to be explored. The only remark that could contribute to a better understanding of the text concerns the application of abbreviations. As the book talks about new technologies and uses terms that are unknown to a wide range of people, it might make sense to include the full meaning of the abbreviation. In conclusion, Aging, Technology and Health is a great contribution to understanding the help that technology can provide in the process of active and healthy aging, and I recommend it primarily to students of social gerontology, but also to anyone else who meets the elderly in their work and people who think that the use of some technology could help in their work.