Reducing Older Adult Digital Exclusion: Home-Delivered-Meals Drivers as ‘Warm Experts’ to Introduce Technology

Overview: Older adults (OAs) have lower ICT use than other ages. Family members – ‘warm experts’ – encourage ICT use, but isolated OAs lack warm experts. The Virtual Table project builds relationships between home-delivered meals drivers and isolated recipients. Components of the model and pilot results to date will be presented.Proposal text: Across most gender, race, and ethnicity groups, older adults (OAs) report lower utilization of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) than other age groups. This digital exclusion results in isolation, loneliness, and reduced utilization of telehealth and other online services.
In many families, ‘warm experts,’ generally young family members, can overcome OA skepticism about ICTs (Hanninen et al., 2021). These family supporters introduce OAs to devices and applications, guide learning their use, and support them through transitions to new applications and software updates.
Many low-income OAs live alone, often with no family or friends who can become their warm experts. This is the case for many homebound recipients of home-delivered-meals (HDMs), who number over 800,000 in the US (Mabli et al., 2017). The Virtual Table model is built on the idea that for HDM recipients, their meal driver can become a warm expert because over time special relationships are developed (Papadaki et al., 2021; Thomas et al., 2020)
The Virtual Table model:
Potential participants were prescreened for exclusion criteria such as dementia and serious health conditions. Services provided to consented participants include:
- A TCL tablet and 6 months cell service; this standardizes the learning environment
- A color-printed Manual using screenshots and large print, covering core topics such as tablet usage, security, Gmail and Chrome basics, Zoom/Duo instructions, etc.
- Weekly peer tutor sessions (8-12 weeks) covering core topics and participant selections; then 8-12 weeks covering telecare
- Weekly connection with a “chat volunteer,” initially just as a ‘check-in,’ and later with brief scripted content dealing with loneliness
- Optional Zoom ‘celebrations’ for participants to meet and socialize.
Research

Design:
Data collection includes:
- Intake Surveys, covering current technology ownership and use
- Baseline Interviews, covering demographics, loneliness and network scales, PHQ-9, technology competency
- Midpoint interviews, covering participants’ assessments of model components, and telehealth experience (in preparation for the telehealth content)
- Brief weekly notes from peer tutors and chat volunteers
- Posttest Interviews, covering the Baseline items, and participant feedback about strengths and weakness of the project, and the impact on them

Results:
The pilot is recruiting 25 participants, with 15 already recruited. Data collection and analysis will be completed prior to the APM.
Preliminary lessons learned include:
- There is a wide range in participant knowledge, experience, and comfort, requiring flexibility to respond to individual preferences.
- Tutors report feelings of reward from participants’ positive response.
- The continuing impact of COVID-19 has led some tutors to avoid in-person contact with participants and to use Zoom/Duo video instead. This reinforces project plans to introduce videoconferencing tools early.
- COVID-19 has also negatively impacted recruitment of participants and volunteers.
Implications for social work education:
In addition to family caregivers, who students generally learn to include in planning and service delivery, those who deliver community-based services may provide additional key contacts and resources to support attainment of social work goals. Students in placements related to services to OAs should be encouraged to integrate such relationships in practice.