Towards a Decision Support Tool to Prescribe Recreation for Older Adults in Social Isolation (RxOSI)

EasyChair Preprint 9112

Abstract

Social isolation is the objective lack of social connection. Social isolation in older adults was an issue before the COVID-19 pandemic hit and the issue only got exacerbated during this period. Today, loneliness is a bigger public health problem than obesity, and often isolated older adults are lonely too. Recreation activities such as participation in physical activity, arts, music and other such social activities offer physical, mental, social and cognitive benefits to older adults, including reduction of social isolation and loneliness. Social prescription has gained momentum in countries like the United Kingdom and Canada. Social prescriptions usually include a diverse range of non-clinical interventions, such as educational classes, arts and culture engagement, peer-run social groups, and nature-based activities. The present state-of-art literature recommends multiple interventions for social isolation and loneliness, however the literature falls short of explaining the basis of these recommendations. Decision support tools have been extensively used in clinical medicine and they help standardize the quality of care and improve physician workflow. In the field of knowledge engineering, qualitative methods have a significant contribution to convert domain knowledge into decision support tools. This paper describes a thesis on a qualitative study that will iteratively build and validate a decision support tool recommending recreational activities to older adults for reducing social isolation. The paper provides a brief overview on the state-of-art, challenges, proposed solution, methodology, contributions and work-in-progress.

Keyphrases: Goals, decision support tool, older adults, recreation, requirements, social isolation

@booklet{EasyChair:9112,
  author    = {Namrata Bagaria},
  title     = {Towards a Decision Support Tool to Prescribe Recreation for Older Adults in Social Isolation (RxOSI)},
  howpublished = {EasyChair Preprint 9112},
  year      = {EasyChair, 2022}}