C) Need to Establish a Dedicated System to Bridge the Digital Divide
Efforts to diagnose and address the risk of exclusion of the elderly due to the rapid
progress of digitalization are continuing internationally. The United Nations Economic
Commission for Europe (UNECE), through “Aging Policy Brief No. 26: Aging in the
Digital Age” in 2021 (UNECE Policy Brief on Aging No. 26, July 2021), has emphasized
importance of recognizing the intersection of the various factors that determine whether
older people use digital technologies in order to understand the digital barriers of elderlies.
In London, from 2017 to 2018, the Mi Wifi pilot project was implemented to rent smart
devices and provide digital education to vulnerable groups, such as the elderly and the
disabled. In the case of Japan, the development of care robots began in the 2000s and is
awaiting development and commercialization.
The elderly group have difficulty in attaining appropriate level of digital literacy due to
lack of experience, confidence, motivation, interest, inaccessible design, and physical and
cognitive disabilities, in addition to access to the digital device or the Internet. In particular,
these factors are linked to social and economic conditions. For example, when the elderly
want to use digital devices, they depend on their children the most, but when it is difficult to
ask for help or when their children seem to ignore them, they have conflicts with their
children and do not want to use the digital devices any longer. Elderly people with such
experiences are highly likely to become ignorant whenever new digital devices and
infrastructures appear.
In the end, to solve the problem, the elderly, education experts, and policy experts
commonly say that digital education need to be provided more assertively. The issues are
cultivating personnel to effectively conduct digital education, improving education
methods, and improving accessibility to education. There is a limit to the educational effects
of large-scale group education for the elderly people due to memory loss and cognitive
function deterioration, and therefore, it is necessary to continuously provide customized
education centered on individualized or small groups lessons according to the digital
competency level of the elderly.
Specifically, it is necessary to prepare a systematic and long-term education plan for
digital education for the elderly using existing support personnel who have close contact
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