Technology foresight methodologies for senior citizens / Norhidayah Kamarudin

In recent years, there has been a sharp increase in the number of senior citizens worldwide and more old people are alive nowadays than the last time. In some extent, the ascending numbers of this population will definitely lead to the need of extra care to support and facilitate their life. Thus, the development of new technologies could be considered as one of the relevant steps to help senior citizens in performing their daily activities. Nevertheless, the technology developed for senior citizens is differ from the one developed for children or adults in term of scope, design, or functions since the technology designed for elderly is based on certain level of agreeable elements, which aligned with the characteristics of this population. Therefore, in order to identify the possible future technology for elderly, an appropriate technology foresight methodology should be implemented. The use of appropriate technology foresight methodology could helps researchers to conduct the research effectively and ensure that they are in the right path throughout the overall research process, which in turn would helps them to come out with several possible technologies for senior citizens in future. Hence, this research intends to explore various technology foresight methodologies in order to come out with a set of suggested methods for foresight study, particularly in term of elderly. Basically, this research is grounded on qualitative interpretive research, whereby it use content analysis approach to explore and gather vast amount of information related to technology foresight methods. In this research, 33 foresight methods have been selected and each method is discussed comprehensively, before they are being classified based on the four types of K-capabilities (expertise-, creativity-, interaction-, and evidence-based). Those categorized methods, will be then detailed down based on the context of elderly in Malaysia. Eventually, the information gathered will be analyzed and converge in order to enable the researcher to come out with relevance technology foresight methods for senior citizen in Malaysia. Consequently, it is hoped that the methods suggested can be used to help researchers and industrial people to conduct foresight study effectively and come out with new design of technologies to enhance living standard among the senior citizens in Malaysia.