Ambient Assisted Working Solutions for the Ageing Workforce: A Literature Review

Abstract

The increase in older workers in industrialized countries has become evident in the past two decades. The need to support the ageing workforce to effectively perform their tasks has resulted in Ambient Assisted Working (AAW), consisting of developing “smart” systems that can adapt themselves to workers’ needs by exploiting ambient intelligence (AmI) solutions. In AAW, AmI provides flexible workplace adaptations for a wide range of older workers (including persons characterized by chronic conditions and disabilities), while ensuring the ageing workforce’s safety and comfort within the workplace. This work proposes a systematic literature review with the aim of identifying trends among existing AAW solutions specifically designed for older workers. The review adopted the PRISMA methodology, focusing on journal articles and surveying more than 1500 works. The review underlined an absence of articles completely devoted to this research question. Nonetheless, by extending the research question to existing AmI solutions for workers that could potentially be able to support older workers in performing their working activities, it was possible to draw some considerations on the adoption of AmI for the ageing workforce. Among them, the review identified the different types of supporting AmI solutions provided to AAW, which technologies were adopted, and which workplaces were investigated the most. Finally, this work leveraged the findings of the review process to sketch some future research directions for AAW as a discipline.