Background: Loneliness and social isolation can have severe effects on human health and well-being. Partial solutions to combat these circumstances in demographically aging societies have been sought from the field of information and communication technology (ICT). Objective: This systematic literature review investigates the research conducted on older adults’ loneliness and social isolation, and physical ICTs, namely robots, wearables, and smart homes, in the era of ambient assisted living (AAL). The aim is to gain insight into how technology can help overcome loneliness and social isolation other than by fostering social communication with people and what the main open-ended challenges according to the reviewed studies are. Methods: The data were collected from 7 bibliographic databases. A preliminary search resulted in 1271 entries that were screened based on predefined inclusion criteria. The characteristics of the selected studies were coded, and the results were summarized to answer our research questions. Results: The final data set consisted of 23 empirical studies. We found out that ICT solutions such as smart homes can help detect and predict loneliness and social isolation, and technologies such as robotic pets and some other social robots can help alleviate loneliness to some extent. The main open-ended challenges across studies relate to the need for more robust study samples and study designs. Further, the reviewed studies report technology- and topic-specific open-ended challenges. Conclusions: Technology can help assess older adults’ loneliness and social isolation, and alleviate loneliness without direct interaction with other people. The results are highly relevant in the COVID-19 era, where various social restrictions have been introduced all over the world, and the amount of research literature in this regard has increased recently.

As an inevitable process, the number of older adults is increasing in many countries worldwide. Two of the main problems that society is being confronted with more and more, in this respect, are the inter-related aspects of feelings of loneliness and social isolation among older adults. In particular, the ongoing COVID-19 crisis and its associated restrictions have exacerbated the loneliness and social-isolation problems. This paper is first and foremost a comprehensive survey of loneliness monitoring and management solutions, from the multidisciplinary perspective of technology, gerontology, socio-psychology, and urban built environment. In addition, our paper also investigates machine learning-based technological solutions with wearable-sensor data, suitable to measure, monitor, manage, and/or diminish the levels of loneliness and social isolation, when one also considers the constraints and characteristics coming from social science, gerontology, and architecture/urban built environments points of view. Compared to the existing state of the art, our work is unique from the cross-disciplinary point of view, because our authors’ team combines the expertise from four distinct domains, i.e., gerontology, social psychology, architecture, and wireless technology in addressing the two inter-related problems of loneliness and social isolation in older adults. This work combines a cross-disciplinary survey of the literature in the four aforementioned domains with a proposed wearable-based technological solution, introduced first as a generic framework and, then, exemplified through a simple proof of concept with dummy data. As the main findings, we provide a comprehensive view on challenges and solutions in utilizing various technologies, particularly those carried by users, also known as wearables, to measure, manage, and/or diminish the social isolation and the perceived loneliness among older adults. In addition, we also summarize the identified solutions which can be used for measuring and monitoring various loneliness- and social isolation-related metrics, and we present and validate, through a simple proof-of-concept mechanism, an approach based on machine learning for predicting and estimating loneliness levels. Open research issues in this field are also discussed.

Neighbourhoods can provide a sense of belonging to a local community and support subjective well‐being. Our goal was to gain novel insight into the value of neighbourhood information and communication technology (ICT) in combating loneliness. Furthermore, we were interested in how a sense of belonging to a local community can be a potential mediating factor and the role of environmental attractiveness. We used data from a nationwide survey of Finnish respondents (N = 1,226) and structural equation modelling for data analysis. We found that perceived environmental attractiveness and a sense of belonging to a local community were negatively associated with loneliness, while the use of neighbourhood ICT was positively associated with loneliness. Perceived environmental attractiveness and use of neighbourhood ICT were positively associated with a sense of belonging to a local community. Perceived environmental attractiveness and use of neighbourhood ICT were negatively associated with loneliness via a sense of belonging to a local community. Our results suggest that perceived environmental attractiveness and use of neighbourhood ICT could help reduce loneliness by enhancing a sense of belonging to a local community. Interventions aimed at improving perceived environmental attractiveness and individuals' senses of belonging to a local community could be particularly helpful in combating loneliness. Please refer to the Supplementary Material section to find this article's Community and Social Impact Statement.

BACKGROUND Loneliness and social isolation can have severe effects on human health and well-being. Partial solutions to combat these circumstances in demographically aging societies have been sought from the field of information and communication technology (ICT). OBJECTIVE This systematic literature review investigates the research conducted on older adults’ loneliness and social isolation, and physical ICTs, namely robots, wearables, and smart homes, in the era of ambient assisted living (AAL). The aim is to gain insight into how technology can help overcome loneliness and social isolation other than by fostering social communication with people and what the main open-ended challenges according to the reviewed studies are. METHODS The data were collected from 7 bibliographic databases. A preliminary search resulted in 1271 entries that were screened based on predefined inclusion criteria. The characteristics of the selected studies were coded, and the results were summarized to answer our research questions. RESULTS The final data set consisted of 23 empirical studies. We found out that ICT solutions such as smart homes can help detect and predict loneliness and social isolation, and technologies such as robotic pets and some other social robots can help alleviate loneliness to some extent. The main open-ended challenges across studies relate to the need for more robust study samples and study designs. Further, the reviewed studies report technology- and topic-specific open-ended challenges. CONCLUSIONS Technology can help assess older adults’ loneliness and social isolation, and alleviate loneliness without direct interaction with other people. The results are highly relevant in the COVID-19 era, where various social restrictions have been introduced all over the world, and the amount of research literature in this regard has increased recently.

This paper addresses the concept of transformation as a restorative practice with great potential in architectural education. The concept was used as the foundation of a post-professional, research-oriented master’s degree design studio held for the first time during the spring semester of 2022 as a collaboration between two European universities. Conventionally understood as the action of ‘transmuting something into something else’, transformation implies acknowledging and reinterpreting pre-existences, and therefore challenges creation ex novo, which is a notion traditionally more prevalent in heritage and conservation courses rather than in design courses. However, the potential of this concept can be exploited at different and complementary levels, as this paper aims to demonstrate. This choice was motivated by the imperative of sustainability, where the ethos of reutilisation takes precedence by purposely narrowing scope and concentrating design research strategies on transformative processes. To be precise, the above-mentioned pilot course explored the concept of transformation from a twofold perspective. Firstly, transformation was understood as a research-through-design strategy that showed students how transformative design actions could be used as actual methods for theoretical research at postgraduate level, interweaving the logics of the creative act with the logics of research and thinking processes. Secondly, transformation was explored from a deeper pedagogical perspective, in line with constructivist approaches and theories of the self, with the specific ambition of triggering significant changes in the way students and teachers think and act. This latter approach led to the application of Jack Mezirow’s (1991) notion of ‘disorienting dilemmas’ as the main educational device of the course, which in turn became a key innovative input for reconsidering the research-through-design methodology. Both levels in which the concept of transformation was used in the course were tied together and intertwined thanks to their interpretation as Raumgeschehen, (‘spatial events’), borrowing Hille von Seggern’s (2019) term. To evaluate the implications of such a pedagogical proposal, this paper poses and tries to answer three main questions: 1) What are the contributions of the concept of transformation – as conceived, implemented and tested in this course – to the body of knowledge of research through design in educational contexts? 2) To what extent can this understanding of transformation be considered a restorative practice for the architectural discipline? and 3) What would the main guidelines to follow to refine the course for future iterations or to put it into effect in other contexts be? To answer these questions, authors have used a mixed-method approach, combining a literature review on the concept of transformation and a critical analysis of the students’ performance and other empirical data extracted from a post-course survey taken by both students and teachers. The paper shows the relevant work of the students participating in the course. By assessing their specific achievements, this analysis also serves to identify key guidelines for future iterations of the course or application in other contexts. Ultimately, the study reflects upon the values and possibilities introduced by the concept of transformation within architectural design-research pedagogy on a more general level, inspired by a wide understanding of sustainability.