Elderly Training For Using Digital Technologies: A Literature Review And An Empirical Research In North Western Romania

This paper addresses the issue of the use of general-purpose and assistive digital technologies by the elderly, able to make their lives easier and to reduce society's costs regarding their assistance. The focus is on training the elderly in order to use these technologies as follows: the role of initial formal education, barriers in use, attitude towards the idea of training, preferences on training methods, trainers, and the training process. The research uses an initial study of the literature that allows the identification of a first set of findings and the initial configuration of the survey for empirical research. The latter was conducted by direct or online interviews of the subjects based on a defined matrix questionnaire on domains and topics. The possibility of direct dialogue allowed the extension of the interview to a semi-structured form that brought additional information to the final conclusions. The low number of interviewed subjects is not likely to affect the relevance of the results, the research assumes from the beginning a qualitative approach and not one with statistical relevance.