Developing a Community Event Sharing/ Hosting Website to Improve Quality of Life among Malaysia’s Senior Citizens

Abstract

In Malaysia, in the coming year 2020, 7.2% of the population would be 75 years of age. The problems are how should we engage seniors so that quality of life is maintained after retirement, i.e., they can still join and contribute back to society while retaining financial independence? The objectives of our project are to engage seniors actively through an integrated Web platform, JoinIt and help them to find answers to the common question of when retired, what I am supposed to do? We base our model on China, Korea and Japan, which have developed strategies to cater to their aging population and are more similar in culture. Strategies range from the Silver Age Action Initiative in China, to the Intergenerational Sympathy Project in Japan to the Seongnam Senior Complex in South Korea. Based on user requirements, we found that seniors in our case study preferred to engage with other seniors and are not so keen on intergenerational activities. Hence, we decided to enable seniors to join events, volunteer, host social activities and shop and sell products. Organizations such as Pertiwi, D’Happy Club and the Lions Club are featured. Evaluations are based on a standard user experience questionnaire and the Technology Acceptance Model. Alpha-beta testing findings reveal positive increases across all user experience attributes and technology acceptance. Most notable are overall understanding and perceived value towards the website’s purposes, contents and functions, pleasantness, intention to use and surprisingly, perceived inventiveness. The top three reasons for these increases will be presented.