The study, conducted between March and July 2025, used a retrospective qualitative cross-sectional design, asking participants to look back on their pandemic experiences. The research team layered three complementary methods. They carried out 28 in-depth interviews with women living with HIV, the group with perhaps the most at stake when health services wobble, since uninterrupted antiretroviral therapy is the bedrock of viral suppression and prevention of mother-to-child transmission. They then convened 14 focus group discussions, two per study site with six participants each, gathering 84 HIV-negative community members to capture the wider social fabric in which health decisions are made. Finally, they conducted 24 key informant interviews with health workers, policymakers, Community Advisory Board members and HIV activists, the professionals who stood on the front lines of the information battle. This triangulated structure matters methodologically: by comparing what women experienced, what communities believed, and what officials observed, the researchers could cross-check accounts and build a picture more robust than any single vantage point could provide.

Analysis followed Braun and Clarke’s six-phase thematic framework, a rigorous inductive approach in which codes emerge from the data rather than being imposed upon it. The team then mapped the resulting themes onto Kleinman’s explanatory model, a classic framework in medical anthropology that examines how patients, families and clinicians each construct their own understanding of illness. That theoretical choice is telling. It signals that the authors view pandemic misinformation not merely as a technical failure of message delivery but as a clash between competing explanatory systems, in which a WhatsApp rumor about vaccines causing infertility can carry as much explanatory power for a pregnant woman as an official Ministry of Health bulletin, particularly when the rumor arrives in her own language and the bulletin does not.

Six themes crystallized from the data. The first concerned access to maternal and HIV information through digital and media channels, revealing a landscape of stark inequality. Radio and television remained lifelines for many, but smartphone ownership and reliable connectivity were unevenly distributed, leaving some women dependent on secondhand information relayed by neighbors. The second theme explored how participants understood and evaluated health information, and here the study surfaced a critical gap: many respondents lacked the practical skills to distinguish credible sources from fabricated ones, to cross-check claims, or to recognize the hallmarks of manipulated content. Digital and media literacy, the capacity to access, analyze, evaluate and create media messages, was not a luxury in this context. It was the immune system of public health communication, and for many it was compromised.

The third theme documented a more hopeful counterpoint: digital media as a tool for health communication and service continuity. Where connectivity existed, it kept care alive. Telephone calls, text messages and social platforms allowed health workers to check in on patients, remind them of appointments, and deliver antiretroviral refills through adapted mechanisms when lockdowns made clinic visits hazardous. The fourth theme, however, catalogued the challenges in accessing, understanding and using health information, and it is here that the study’s most sobering findings reside. Participants described inconsistent messaging from authorities, content that arrived in English rather than local languages, and the sheer velocity of rumor compared with the deliberate pace of official correction. Misinformation about COVID-19 shaped risk perceptions, deterred care-seeking, and disrupted treatment adherence, particularly for antenatal care and HIV services, where continuity is everything.

The fifth theme examined social and contextual influences on information use, and it underscores why health communication can never be reduced to broadcasting. Decisions about whether to attend an antenatal visit or continue therapy were filtered through household power dynamics, religious beliefs, cultural understandings of illness, and the opinions of trusted figures in the community. A message from a distant official voice competed against a message from a mother-in-law, a pastor, or a village health team member known personally for years. In Kleinman’s terms, the explanatory models of family and community often outweighed the biomedical model in determining behavior. Any communication strategy that ignores this social architecture, the study implies, is shouting into a storm.

From the sixth theme emerged concrete recommendations, and they read like a blueprint for pandemic-resilient health communication. Participants called for strengthening digital and media literacy itself, so that citizens are equipped not just with information but with the evaluative skills to judge it. They urged improvements in digital access, recognizing that literacy without connectivity is hollow. They demanded local-language content, so that vital guidance about antiretroviral therapy or danger signs in pregnancy does not evaporate at the boundary of a language barrier. They asked for consistent messaging, since contradictory guidance from different authorities corrodes the trust on which all compliance depends. And they proposed integrating digital channels, mass media and community-based approaches, a hybrid model in which a radio broadcast, a WhatsApp reminder and a village health team visit reinforce one another rather than compete.

The study’s authors are candid about its limitations. Because participants reflected on experiences from 2020 to 2022 during interviews conducted in 2025, recall bias was possible; memories of a crisis period can blur or be reshaped by subsequent events. The team mitigated this through careful probing, contextual prompts and triangulation across the three data sources, but the retrospective design remains a constraint worth noting. Ethical safeguards were thorough: approval came from the Makerere University School of Public Health Research and Ethics Committee and the Uganda National Council for Science and Technology, written informed consent was obtained from all participants with thumbprint provisions for those unable to sign, and confidentiality was protected through anonymized identifiers and pseudonyms in group discussions. The research was supported by the Royal Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene, with additional funding from the NIHR Global Health Research Professorship.

Why does this Ugandan study resonate far beyond its borders? Because its central finding is universal: misinformation does not merely spread false facts, it disrupts the continuity of care on which chronic conditions depend. HIV is the paradigmatic case. Antiretroviral therapy demands near-perfect adherence, and prevention of mother-to-child transmission demands that pregnant women remain engaged with services through pregnancy, delivery and breastfeeding. A pandemic that simultaneously overwhelms clinics and floods the information environment with noise strikes precisely at that continuity. The study shows that misinformation, social and cultural beliefs, and limited access to digital health information together influenced how Ugandans understood COVID-19 and used health services, eroding trust in health messages and deterring care-seeking for maternal and HIV care specifically.

The implications for future pandemic preparedness are direct. Low- and middle-income countries, where smartphone penetration is partial and health literacy varies widely, cannot rely on digital-first strategies alone. The study’s vision is instead one of layered redundancy: digital tools for those who can reach them, mass media for broad reach, and community health workers, including Uganda’s village health teams, as trusted human translators of official guidance. Investing in digital and media literacy before the next crisis, the authors argue, is as much a part of pandemic preparedness as stockpiling oxygen or training intensivists. Clear communication, reliable information and digital inclusion are not soft accessories to a public health response. They are the connective tissue that keeps a pregnant woman attending her antenatal visits and a woman living with HIV taking her tablets, day after day, even when the world outside the clinic has gone quiet and strange.

Subject of Research: Digital and media literacy in health communication for maternal and HIV care during pandemics in Uganda

Article Title: Leveraging digital and media literacy for effective health communication in maternal and HIV care during pandemics in Uganda

Article References: Twimukye, A., Waitt, C., & Olungah, C. O. (2026). Leveraging digital and media literacy for effective health communication in maternal and HIV care during pandemics in Uganda. BMC Public Health. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12889-026-29746-3

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1186/s12889-026-29746-3

Keywords: COVID-19, misinformation, health communication, digital literacy, media literacy, maternal health, HIV, antiretroviral therapy, Uganda, pandemic preparedness, qualitative research, digital inclusion

The research, conducted by Xiaona Zhang and Dan Li of the School of Public Administration at Sichuan University together with Bo Peng of Yili Normal University, breaks the broad concept of digital poverty into three separate types: digital material poverty, digital awareness poverty, and digital skills poverty. Digital material poverty refers to the lack of physical access, meaning older adults who do not own or cannot use devices such as smartphones or computers, or who lack the connectivity needed to go online. Digital awareness poverty captures a subtler deficit, describing older people who may have access to technology but do not recognize its value or feel motivated to engage with it. Digital skills poverty, the third type, describes those who have devices and interest but lack the competence to use them effectively.

This three-way classification is the analytical backbone of the study. Rather than treating the digital divide as a simple binary of connected versus unconnected, the authors argue that the barriers older adults face differ in kind, not just in degree, and that these different barriers may harm well-being through different routes. Against the backdrop of intertwined population aging and digital transformation, the study set out to quantify how each type of digital poverty affects subjective well-being, the personal assessment older adults make of their own happiness and satisfaction with life.

Methodologically, the researchers employed Ordinary Least Squares regression models to estimate the direct effects of the three types of digital poverty on subjective well-being. OLS regression is a standard statistical technique that estimates how a change in an explanatory variable, in this case the severity of a given type of digital poverty, is associated with a change in an outcome variable, here subjective well-being, while holding other measured factors constant. By estimating separate effects for material, awareness, and skills poverty, the models could reveal whether one form of exclusion matters more than another, or whether all three operate as independent drags on well-being.

The headline result is stark in its consistency: all three types of digital poverty negatively affect older adults’ subjective well-being. Whether the barrier is a missing device, a missing sense of why the digital world matters, or missing skills to navigate it, the outcome is the same direction of harm. For a rapidly aging society in which digital services are becoming the default gateway to banking, healthcare, and social contact, this finding reframes digital exclusion as a well-being issue, not merely a convenience or access issue.

But the study goes a step further by asking how this harm travels. To map the underlying mechanisms, the authors constructed a multiple mediation model, a statistical framework designed to test whether the effect of a cause on an outcome flows through intermediate variables. In this case, the mediators were online participation and offline participation, examined in their specific forms. Online participation was broken down into online life participation, online leisure participation, and online social interaction participation, while offline participation was examined through leisure and interaction participation. The logic is intuitive: digital poverty may damage well-being partly by cutting people off from activities, both screen-based and in-person, that would otherwise nourish their daily lives.

The mediation analysis identified these specific forms of online and offline participation as potential mediating pathways. In other words, older adults experiencing digital poverty tend to participate less in online life, online leisure, and online social interaction, and also less in offline leisure and interaction, and these reduced levels of participation in turn account for part of the damage to their subjective well-being. The picture that emerges is of a double exclusion: people who are digitally poor are also less engaged in the offline social and leisure fabric of their communities, and both deficits compound to lower their sense of well-being.

One result stands out from the rest for its complexity. Online leisure participation exhibited differentiated suppressing effects, a statistical pattern in which the mediator does not simply transmit the negative effect of the cause but partially counteracts or alters it depending on context. The authors interpret this as evidence that the impact of online leisure activities on the well-being of older adults may be context-dependent. Unlike online social interaction or online life participation, which appear to function as straightforward channels through which digital poverty erodes well-being, online leisure occupies a more ambiguous role, potentially buffering some effects in certain circumstances while behaving differently in others.

The study’s conclusions carry direct policy weight. The authors argue that their findings deepen the understanding of the relationship between digital poverty and subjective well-being and provide important policy implications for promoting active aging and developing a categorized, multi-layered digital inclusion policy framework. The word categorized is doing significant work here: if material poverty, awareness poverty, and skills poverty are distinct conditions with distinct mechanisms, then a one-size-fits-all digital inclusion program, say, handing out devices, will not reach the older adult whose real barrier is a lack of confidence or skills, and a training course will not help someone who cannot afford a smartphone in the first place. A multi-layered framework would instead pair hardware access programs with awareness campaigns and skills training, calibrated to the specific deficit each older adult faces.

The research arrives at a moment when the intersection of aging and digitization has become one of the defining social questions of the decade, and its framing of digital poverty as a progression, from lacking material access to lacking awareness to lacking skills, offers researchers and policymakers a vocabulary for a problem often discussed only in vague terms. The study was funded by the National Social Science Fund of China and the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities of China, received ethics approval from the Ethics Committee of the School of Public Administration at Sichuan University, and was conducted with written informed consent from all participants under the standards of the Declaration of Helsinki. Published open access in BMC Geriatrics, the work invites replication in other aging societies, where the same three-layered divide between older adults and the digital world may be quietly shaping not just what people can do, but how they feel about their lives.

Subject of Research: The impact of digital material, awareness, and skills poverty on the subjective well-being of older adults in China

Article Title: From digital material poverty to digital skills poverty: the impact of digital poverty on subjective well-being among older adults in China

Article References: Zhang, X., Peng, B., & Li, D. (2026). From digital material poverty to digital skills poverty: the impact of digital poverty on subjective well-being among older adults in China. BMC Geriatrics. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12877-026-08326-5

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1186/s12877-026-08326-5

Keywords: digital poverty, older adults, subjective well-being, China, digital divide, digital skills, social participation, active aging, gerontology, online leisure, digital inclusion, BMC Geriatrics

The researchers used interpretative phenomenological analysis, a qualitative methodology developed to capture the lived experience of individuals in rich, first-person detail. Rather than surveying hundreds of people with closed-ended questionnaires, they conducted in-depth interviews with eight participants aged 65 and above, each of whom had direct experience using at least one type of smart elderly care service. This approach, rooted in the philosophical tradition of phenomenology, asks not simply whether people use a technology or how often, but what the technology feels like in the texture of daily existence—how it reshapes routines, relationships, self-perception, and the sense of security or vulnerability that accompanies aging at home.

From these interviews, four overarching themes crystallized: positive empowerment, negative barriers, adaptation challenges, and cultural and social support dynamics. The empowerment theme is the story that technology advocates love to tell. Participants described genuine appreciation for the convenience of remote consultations, which spared them arduous trips across a hilly city to see a doctor. Smart household devices reduced the physical burden of everyday tasks, and health monitoring systems provided a continuous, ambient safety net—detecting falls, tracking vital signs, and alerting family members or care providers when something went wrong. For some older adults, these functions translated directly into a renewed sense of autonomy and confidence, a feeling that technology was extending their capacity to live on their own terms.

But the barriers theme tells a sobering counter-story. The complexity of the technology emerged as a persistent source of frustration. Interfaces designed with younger, digitally fluent users in mind often assumed familiarity with touchscreens, menus, notifications, and account management that many older adults simply do not possess. This is not a trivial design inconvenience; it is a gatekeeping mechanism. When a health monitoring device requires multiple steps to operate or a telemedicine platform demands login credentials and software updates, the technology that promises inclusion can instead produce exclusion, leaving the very people it targets dependent on others to access its benefits. The study’s participants experienced this not as a technical hiccup but as a personal failing, a corrosive reminder that the modern world is being built for someone else.

Privacy and security concerns added a second layer of resistance. Health monitoring systems and smart home devices, by their very nature, collect continuous streams of intimate data: when a person sleeps, when they leave the house, their heart rate, their medication adherence, their movements through private space. Participants in the study voiced unease about where this data goes, who can see it, and what might happen if it were exposed or misused. In a country where digital surveillance infrastructure is extensive and data protection frameworks for consumer health technologies are still maturing, these concerns are not paranoid abstractions. The researchers found that such anxieties actively undermined trust in the systems, and trust, as decades of technology acceptance research have shown, is a precondition for sustained use.

Perhaps the most poignant finding concerns emotional responsiveness—or the lack of it. Smart care systems excel at measurement and logistics, but they are poor conversationalists. Participants noted that the technologies felt cold, unable to provide the warmth, empathy, and social connection that are as central to wellbeing in old age as blood pressure readings. A fall-detection sensor cannot ask how your day went. A telemedicine consultation, efficient as it may be, compresses the relational dimension of care into a transaction. The study suggests that when smart care is positioned as a substitute for human contact rather than a supplement to it, older adults experience a deficit that no algorithm currently fills, and this emotional gap contributes to abandonment of the technologies over time.

Adaptation challenges formed the third theme, capturing the ongoing, effortful process of learning to live with new devices. Technology adoption is not a single decision but a temporal journey, and the participants’ accounts reveal how initial enthusiasm can erode under the weight of maintenance demands, software changes, forgotten procedures, and devices that fail to adapt to changing physical or cognitive abilities. Limited adaptability—systems that cannot adjust to a user’s declining eyesight, tremor, or memory—meant that a device purchased as an aid could become an obstacle. High financial costs compounded the problem. Smart care services in China often require upfront hardware purchases plus recurring subscription fees, and for older adults on fixed pensions, these expenses are not negligible. The result is a stratified landscape in which the benefits of smart aging accrue disproportionately to wealthier, more digitally literate seniors, while others are left behind—a dynamic the researchers explicitly link to new forms of inequality and stress.

The fourth theme, cultural and social support dynamics, situates the entire phenomenon within the specific fabric of Chinese family life. Traditional cultural views about aging, care, and filial responsibility shaped how participants interpreted the role of technology in their lives. In a society where adult children have long been expected to be the primary caregivers for aging parents, delegating care functions to machines can feel like a demotion of family duty, or conversely, like an admission of being a burden. The study found that inadequate family support hindered sustained use: when adult children were unavailable to help set up devices, troubleshoot problems, or reassure anxious parents about data security, the technologies frequently fell into disuse. This finding resonates with a broader international literature on intergenerational networks and digital inclusion, which consistently shows that the digital divide among older people is bridged less by better interfaces than by patient, sustained human assistance.

The implications of the study extend well beyond Chongqing. China is aging at a pace and scale without historical precedent, and its national policy framework promotes smart elderly care as a cornerstone of the response, with community home-based care services now claiming full coverage in cities like Chongqing. Yet this research demonstrates a widening gap between policy aspiration and lived reality. The authors argue that closing this gap requires action on three fronts: developing genuinely age-friendly technologies designed around the sensory, cognitive, and emotional realities of older users; strengthening community and family support networks so that adoption is scaffolded by human relationships; and implementing robust data protection measures that give older adults concrete reasons to trust the systems collecting their most intimate information. None of these is a software patch; each demands sustained institutional commitment.

What makes this study compelling is precisely its refusal to treat smart care as either salvation or threat. The dual role the researchers identify—technology that enhances quality of life while simultaneously creating new forms of exclusion and stress—is the honest accounting that aging societies everywhere will need as they digitize eldercare. Eight voices in one Chinese city cannot settle the question of how to build humane smart care systems, but they illuminate something that large-scale surveys routinely miss: that the success of these technologies will be decided not in engineering labs or policy documents, but in kitchens and bedrooms, in the daily negotiations of older people deciding whether a device makes them feel more capable or more diminished. Listening to those voices, the study suggests, is not a soft supplement to technical development. It is the foundation on which inclusive, sustainable smart care must be built.

Subject of Research: Lived experiences and challenges of home-dwelling older adults using smart care services in urban China

Article Title: Practices and Challenges of Smart Care Services for Older Adults in Chongqing: A Phenomenological Study of Home-dwelling Older Adults’ Experiences

Article References: Li, F., & Peng, J. (2026). Practices and Challenges of Smart Care Services for Older Adults in Chongqing: A Phenomenological Study of Home-dwelling Older Adults’ Experiences. Ageing International, 51(4), Article 39. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12126-026-09681-9

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s12126-026-09681-9

Keywords: smart elderly care, older adults, Chongqing, interpretative phenomenological analysis, technology acceptance, digital divide, health monitoring, telemedicine, privacy concerns, aging in place, China, digital inclusion

The study drew on data from the Widely Hokkaido Individual Training for Elderly (WHITE) Study, a community-based health checkup program conducted across 2024 and 2025 in Hokkaido, Japan. Of 158 individuals initially assessed, 97 smartphone-using older adults met the inclusion criteria after the researchers excluded non-users, participants with cognitive impairment defined as a mini-mental state examination score below 23, those with neurological or psychiatric histories such as stroke, depression, Alzheimer’s disease, or Parkinson’s disease, people certified as requiring long-term care, and those with missing key data. The final sample had a median age of 77 years, an interquartile range of 75 to 82 years, and was 73 percent female, reflecting the demographic reality of aging rural Japanese communities where such checkup programs operate.

To capture the breadth of digital engagement, participants were asked whether they used each application on a daily basis from a predefined list of twelve common categories: phone calls, email, camera, quick response code use, web browsing, video streaming, healthcare-related applications, pedometer, text messaging, Facebook, X (formerly Twitter), and other applications not on the list. The number of applications used daily was summed into a diversity score, and participants were split into a low application diversity group using fewer than five apps and a high application diversity group using five or more. The five-application threshold was grounded in prior United States survey data showing that usage clusters around five to six applications among roughly 40 percent of older smartphone users, and it matched the median app count in the present sample, lending the cutoff empirical credibility.

Occupational participation, the study’s central outcome, was measured with the Self-Completed Occupational Performance Index, a validated self-administered questionnaire rooted in the Canadian Model of Occupational Performance and Engagement. This framework conceptualizes health as emerging from dynamic interactions between the person, the environment, and occupation, and it treats technology as an environmental factor that can either enable or constrain daily performance. The SOPI assesses three domains: leisure, productivity, and self-care. Each domain captures perceived occupational control, meaning how much individuals feel able to decide when and how to engage in an activity; occupational balance, reflecting whether they can allocate sufficient time and energy; and satisfaction with performance, a subjective appraisal of how well activities are carried out. Each domain contains three items rated on five-point scales, yielding raw domain scores from 3 to 15 and a total score standardizable from 0 to 100.

The results were striking in their domain specificity. Overall SOPI scores were substantially higher in the high-diversity group, with a median of 75.0 compared with 55.6 in the low-diversity group, a statistically significant difference. When the researchers examined domains separately, leisure scores favored the high-diversity group, and the productivity gap was even more pronounced, with medians of 12.0 versus 6.0. Self-care showed no significant difference. Pattern analyses of application combinations revealed that low-diversity users clustered almost entirely around basic communication tools, namely phone calls, email, and text messaging, while high-diversity users combined those basics with web browsing, cameras, QR codes, healthcare applications, and video streaming, painting a picture of fundamentally different digital lives.

Crucially, the association survived rigorous statistical adjustment. Using generalized linear models, the team controlled for a comprehensive set of potential confounders: age, sex, education, living situation, medication use, employment status, years of smartphone use, daily usage time, gait speed measured by the 10-meter walk test, cognitive function via the mini-mental state examination, frailty status through the Kihon Checklist, and depressive symptoms on the 15-item Geriatric Depression Scale. Even after this adjustment, using five or more applications was independently associated with higher productivity scores, yielding an adjusted regression coefficient of 2.17 with a 95 percent confidence interval of 0.49 to 3.86. Leisure, by contrast, lost its association after adjustment, with a coefficient of 0.66 and a confidence interval spanning zero. Notably, the productivity effect persisted even though only 12 percent of participants held remunerative jobs and 74 percent were unemployed, suggesting the association reflects broader productive occupations such as household management, coordination, and supporting others rather than formal work alone.

Because the sample was modest, the researchers turned to bootstrap resampling with 2,000 iterations to test whether the finding was a statistical fluke. The bootstrap analysis produced a median regression coefficient of 2.24 with a 95 percent confidence interval of 0.49 to 3.86, closely mirroring the original estimate and confirming the stability of the association. This robustness check matters in small-sample occupational therapy research, where fragile coefficients often dissolve under resampling. Here, the diversity-productivity link held firm across thousands of simulated replications of the dataset, strengthening confidence that the observed relationship is not an artifact of a few influential participants.

Why would app diversity connect specifically to productivity? The authors argue that productive occupations, which encompass planning, coordination, information management, and role fulfillment, are precisely the activities that multifunctional smartphone use supports. Email and messaging facilitate information exchange; cameras document tasks and events; web browsing opens access to online services and resources; healthcare applications help manage appointments and health information; and QR codes streamline transactions. Prior research supports this interpretation: studies show older adults increasingly use digital methods for managing finances, navigating communities, and organizing to-do lists, and qualitative work demonstrates that seniors can successfully adopt smartphone calendars and reminder systems to structure daily activities. Leisure and self-care, in contrast, may depend less on digital tools or may be sustained through long-established routines that technology has yet to penetrate, which is consistent with the model’s prediction that environmental resources matter differently across occupational domains.

The findings also illuminate the persistent digital divide within older populations. High-diversity users were significantly younger, used smartphones longer, and reported more daily screen time, while low-diversity participants showed higher frailty and depression scores. Previous longitudinal research has linked cognitive capacity and physical function to internet use and digital competence, suggesting that app diversity may partly reflect accumulated experience, skills, and functional resources rather than preference alone. The authors are careful about causality, however. Reverse causation is plausible, since people with greater productive demands may simply adopt more apps, and residual confounding by socioeconomic resources or informal support cannot be excluded. Limitations also include the small sample, the predominance of women, self-reported app use without a technical smartphone definition, and the cross-sectional design that precludes any causal claim.

Nevertheless, the study opens a practical frontier for occupational therapy in an aging, digitalizing world. Rather than counting device ownership or screen time, clinicians could assess which applications older clients actually use and how those patterns align with occupational goals, then design individualized interventions that expand purposeful app use for scheduling, information access, and role management. Prior work linking smartphone proficiency to higher-level everyday competence suggests skill-building belongs at the center of such programs. If confirmed by longitudinal studies with larger, more sex-balanced samples, the humble app grid on an older adult’s home screen may become a meaningful clinical signal, a small window into how deeply a person remains woven into the productive fabric of daily life, and a tangible target for interventions aimed at preserving independence, purpose, and participation in the digital age.

Subject of Research: The association between smartphone application diversity and occupational participation among community-dwelling older adults.

Article Title: Association Between Smartphone Application Diversity and Occupational Participation Among Community-Dwelling Older Adults: A Cross-Sectional Study

Article References: Shimokihara, S., Yokoyama, K., Ihira, H., Matsuzaki-Kihara, Y., Mizumoto, A., Tashiro, H., Saito, H., Makino, K., Katsuura, S., Kobayashi, M., Shimada, K., Yama, K., Miyajima, R., Sasaki, T., & Ikeda, N. (2026). Association Between Smartphone Application Diversity and Occupational Participation Among Community-Dwelling Older Adults: A Cross-Sectional Study. Scandinavian Journal of Occupational Therapy, 33(1), Article 5. https://doi.org/10.1007/s44474-026-00007-1

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s44474-026-00007-1

Keywords: smartphone apps, older adults, occupational participation, digital engagement, productivity, occupational therapy, aging, digital inclusion, gerontechnology, community-dwelling, SOPI, cross-sectional study