Trends in Gerotechnology: A Literature Review

A review of the literature highlights the ways in which information technology offers opportunities in long-term care, an area of research and application that might be called gerotechnology. The authors reviewed eight books about long-term care to find evidence of the possibilities for information technology. That led to the hypothesis that quality control, workflow, and telehealth are important topics for the gerotechnology journal literature. A query about gerotechnology was presented to PubMed, and patterns in that literature supported the hypothesis. A further experiment examined year-by-year trends over the last quarter century and highlighted the increasing importance of telehealth and monitoring in gerotechnology. The trends are consonant with the emergence of computer-assisted life flow as a future topic for gerotechnology.