Android application for elderly social well-being

Abstract

20% of the elderly suffers from a or several mental disorders in their late years. With the rapid growth of the elderly population, the increase in elderly suffering from such mental disorder are projected to increase in the upcoming years. Such mental disorders include severe cases such as dementia to milder cases such as depression and loneliness. The lack of effective treatment for mental disorder identifies the need for such disorders to be prevented by looking out for their psychological well-being. This aim of this project is to tackle one of the causes of mental disorder, loneliness, by developing an android application (ElderGO) to cater to the social needs of the elderly. The application will serve as a social platform for the elderly to be able to find common interest groups and connect with fellow elderly friends that are near them. By providing a virtual space to overcome the physical barriers of social isolation, it allows them to develop relations with people across the same generation. This results in the elderly participating in more social activities and at the same time allow them to seek the same level of social understanding from one another. Simultaneously, taking the health of the elderly into account, the application may also serve as a forum for them to share their own medical issues and remedies. With recent studies showing that the physical health of an elderly is closely associated with their psychological well-being, ElderGO looking after the mental well-being of the elderly will lead to the improvement of the elder’s overall health to a small extent. ElderGO was developed with maintainability, flexibility and user experience as the main focus. The author believes that the project can be easily further continued by new FYP students to further build a more sophisticated system that integrate more functionalities with regards to the health aspect.