Abstract
The concept of resilience is central to understanding how technology might have a role to play in reducing the disproportionate vulnerability of older adults in natural and human-made disasters. Resilience has been defined in various ways by different theorists and researchers, but the common thread is the idea of adaptive capacity and the ability to recover from adversity (Norris, Stevens, Pfefferbaum, Wyche, & Pfefferbaum, 2008). Resilience is not simply a personality style or a characteristic of individuals but a product of the interplay among various determinants of population health: income and social status, social support, education, employment, social and physical environments, health practices and coping skills, developmental factors, biological and genetic endowment, health services, gender, and culture (Public Health Agency of Canada [PHAC], 2003). Disasters are large-scale disturbances or sources of adversity that tax the resilience not only of individuals but of whole communities and broader societies. All members of a population can be at risk depending on the nature of the crisis (InterInter-Agency Standing Committee [IASC], 2006). As would be expected given the multiple interacting determinants that come into play, the pathways from risk vulnerability to disaster resilience are complex (International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies [IFRC], 2004). Similar to other population health challenges, the availability of appropriate resources, effectively implemented, is likely to contribute to more desirable outcomes for individuals and groups who are responding to and attempting to recover from disasters (Lindsay, 2003). Disaster resilience is increasingly in the public eye as the number of catastrophic natural and human-made events continues to rise. This chapter examines the potential for technology to promote disaster resilience among older adults. They are a population subgroup with increased vulnerability in emergencies not because of age per se, but because they are more likely to live with a constellation of risk factors for increased vulnerability, including health problems, dependence on healthcare and social services, lower socioeconomic status, and restricted social networks. In addition, with increasing age, higher proportions of older adults are women, a population subgroup with heightened vulnerability across the life course (Powell, 2009).
Keywords
- Global Position System
- Geographic Information System
- Emergency Management
- Emergency Preparedness
- Disaster Resilience
These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.
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Gibson, M., Gutman, G., Hirst, S., Fitzgerald, K., Fisher, R., Roush, R. (2013). Expanding the Technology Safety Envelope for Older Adults to Include Disaster Resilience. In: Sixsmith, A., Gutman, G. (eds) Technologies for Active Aging. International Perspectives on Aging, vol 9. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4419-8348-0_5
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