Miyuki Inaba

Aging and Elder Care in Japan: A Call for Empowerment-Oriented Community Development

ABSTRACT This article provides a brief overview of the situation of the elderly and their caregivers in Japan, including demographic changes in Japan, development and changes in long-term care policy that have targeted the poorly integrated community care system, and other challenges that the elderly and family caregivers face. Policy direction designed to address these issues is increasingly targeting care by the community versus support care by society (which was initially the main strategy). The potential of empowerment-oriented community development intervention strategies to decrease the gap between available institutional and formal community-based services and the needs of the elderly and their families in their efforts to meet late life challenges is described. The need for an increased role of social workers in community development interventions is explored and strategies are suggested.

Towards Supporting Multigenerational Co-creation and Social Activities: Extending Learning Analytics Platforms and Beyond

As smart technologies pervade our everyday environments, they change what people should learn to live meaningfully as valuable participants of our society. For instance, ubiquitous availability of smart devices and communication networks may have reduced the burden for people to remember factual information. At the same time, they may have increased the benefits to master the uses of new digital technologies. In the midst of such a social and technological shift, we could design novel integrated platforms that support people at all ages to learn, work, collaborate, and co-create easily. In this paper, we discuss our ideas and first steps towards building an extended learning analytics platform that elderly people and unskilled adults can use. By understanding the characteristics and needs of elderly learners and addressing critical user interface issues, we can build pervasive and inclusive learning analytics platforms that trigger contextual reminders to support people at all ages to live and learn actively regardless of age-related differences of cognitive capabilities. We discuss that resolving critical usability problems for elderly people could open up a plethora of opportunities for them to search and exploit vast amount of information to achieve various goals.

Challenges and Issues Under Long-Term Care Insurance for the Elderly in Japan

Abstract This article examines the Long-Term Care Insurance (LTCI) program for the elderly in Japan. LTCI is presented as Japans policy approach to the growing need for care for the elderly. The paper describes the context around which the policy was developed, describes details about the policy, and the implementation issues of the policy. The paper traces the role of social work as a profession in Japan as it relates to the issues of implementing LTCI. Suggestions are made in this paper for possible integration of social work professional roles in effective implementation of LTCI.