Meanings and experiences of assistive technologies in everyday lives of older citizens: a meta-interpretive review.

PURPOSE: The purpose of this study was to synthesize the available qualitative studies on the meaning of assistive technologies (AT) in elderly people's everyday lives in order to identify central concepts, themes, and findings from existing research. METHOD: A systematic search of the literature was conducted, using predetermined search strategies. Exclusion criteria were, in accordance with the meta-interpretive approach, developed iteratively during the reading of abstracts and articles. Interpretations from the studies were used as data for thematic analysis and synthesis of findings. RESULTS: Review of these studies show that older people not only have positive attitude towards AT, but also that acceptance of technologies is a potentially stressful process where trust towards technologies and other people are of importance. Older people have ambivalent experiences with technology, as it gives rise to possibilities as well as constraints, and safety as well as worries. AT enact sometimes conflicting values related to self and society. CONCLUSIONS: Although AT seem to support societal discourses on active aging, the empirical studies in this field show that the technologies enter older people's lives in complex ways, enacting social values and ambivalences and interact with caretakers, relatives and other actors, within specific institutional settings. Implications for rehabilitation In implementing AT, attention should be paid to ambivalences and conflicting values enacted by AT in older people's lives In implementing AT, attention should be paid not only to independency but also to the eventually dependencies, created by the use of AT.

How cancer survivors experience their changed body encountering others.

BACKGROUND: Psychosocial cancer research illustrates how women treated for breast cancer experience physical changes in their bodies and the way they perceive, that, others see their body. But how patients with other types of cancer have experienced changes in their bodies and how this affects their relationship with others is less researched. OBJECTIVES: To explore how cancer survivors with different types of cancer and cancer treatment, experience and handle their changed body, especially when meeting others, and how this influences their everyday life of survivorship, i.e. long after treatment has been completed. METHODS: Participant observation at a Cancer Rehabilitation Centre (CRC). Of the observed participants 23 were selected and interviewed twice. RESULTS: Many participants had a changed body due to the cancer and its treatment. When the cancer survivors meet others they experience that their changed body means that they are avoided, looked at in specific ways, or greeted with a specific compliment. The verbal and nonverbal language that the cancer survivors are met with indicates the existence of a specific discursive aesthetic in relation to the disease and the changed body. This discursive aesthetic represents a silence and secrecy about cancer, which makes it impossible for survivors to talk about their experiences with cancer and a changed body. CONCLUSION: The changed body not only represents the physical sign of cancer, it also represents the social presence and representation of cancer. The analysis gives an insight into general questions of meaning related to the changed body in late modernity.