Elderly People and the City: An investigation with GPS methodology

Name, title and affiliation
Dr. Noam Shoval (noamshoval@huji.ac.il)
Senior Lecturer
Department of Geography
The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel

Short Biography
Dr. Noam Shoval is a senior lecturer at the department of geography of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He completed his Ph.D. at HU (2000) under the supervision of the late Prof. Arie Shachar and conducted post-doctoral research with Prof. Chris Hamnett at the department of geography, King’s College, University of London (2000-2001). During the last year (2007-2008) he was an Alexander von Humboldt Research fellow at the department of geography of the University of Heidelberg (Germany).

Abstract
In the context of ageing populations geographical outdoor mobility can be regarded as a major enabling factor for well-being and quality of life. However, we can often observe that elderly people tend to reduce their geographical mobility in terms of action range and frequency as a result of various constraints. The assessment of outdoor mobility usually relies on subjective reports that the participant or his family members. The "SenTra" project, an Israeli-German cooperation, measures the outdoor activities of elderly people by taking advantage of a combination of tracking technologies in an interdisciplinary project involving researchers from Geography, Social Work, Gerontology, Psychology, and Medicine. The focus is to assess activity patterns of urban living with various levels of cognitive status over a period of one month during three years. The explicit consideration of ethical aspects involved in the use of tracking technology is a substantial component throughout the project. Main objectives are to assess differences in daily outdoor activity patterns of participants with different levels of cognitive functioning, and to analyze how participant's activity patterns are related to their own well-being and that of their families.