Working lives with dementia: A digital futures perspective

Abstract

Ageing populations have often been stereotyped as inherently technologically illiterate, exacerbating concerns that older workers suffer diminished occupational proficiency in later life, especially as working life becomes increasingly digitalized. This presumed incompatibility with work is especially true of older people with dementia. Research on extending working lives has largely ignored people with dementia, instead focussing more broadly on ageing populations. This oversight propagates the misassumption that a dementia diagnosis inevitably necessitates unemployment. We propose a new digital futures perspective, wherein digitalization extends and enhances the working lives of people with dementia, complementing and enhancing employee abilities, by optimizing person–environment fit. To do so, we combine conceptual insights from disability studies, arguing that cognitive impairments become disabling in unsupportive contexts, and dementia studies, advocating coproductive praxis whereby workers with dementia are centred in organizational disability strategy. Coproduction can resist digital ageism, wherein older people are commonly excluded from decision-making and development based on misleading social stereotypes. We then exemplify how digital technologies such as voice-command and LLMs can optimize environments to both extend and enhance the working lives of older adults with cognitive impairment. We also advocate greater research in this area that meaningfully includes people with dementia throughout.