Digital Technology in the Health Field of Older People: Bibliometric
Analysis
Yuchao Le
1
, Shihua Cao
1,2,*
, Mengxin Wang
1
, Danni He
1
,
Yanfei Chen
1
, Beiying Chen
1
and Danlang Zheng
1
1
School of Nursing, Hangzhou Normal University, Hangzhou, Zhejiang, China
2
Department of Nursing, Hangzhou Normal University Qianjiang College, Hangzhou, Zhejiang, China
Keywords:
Digital Technology, Older People, Health, Bibliometric Analysis, Citespace.
Abstract:
The purpose of this study is to conduct bibliometric analysis of published papers on the digital technology in
health field of older people. Data were obtained from Web of Science. The results were evaluated and
visualized by using CiteSpace software. Overall, Quantity and citations of relevant literature show a general
tendency to increase yearly. The highest number of publications was conducted in America. Two large
hotspots were “Internet” and “digital divide”, but researches has tended to be diversified in recent year.
1 INTRODUCTION
Digital technology as a new general technique is
developed with occurrence of electronic computers. It
contains Internet of Things (IoT), cloud computing,
artificial intelligence, blockchain technology and big-
data analytics (Chandra, 2022; Carlsson, 2004).
Digital technology has three characteristics: re-
programmability, homogenization of data and self-
reinforcement in comparison with other technology
innovation (Youngjin, 2010). Nowadays, digital
technology is playing an important role in the health
field of older people with the aggravation of the aging
population (Bail, 2022). Scholars (Ho, 2022) made a
survey about the impact of telehealth for older people.
Alexander (Castleton, 2022) investigated older
people use of tablet to promote the digital inclusion
of them. As digital technology is gaining more and
more applying in the field of older people health,
there are increasing concerns and attentions from
researchers.
Bibliometric study is a measurable informatics
method focusing on quantification, and was proposed
by British scientist Pritchard in 1969 (Pritchard,
1969; Le, 2021). It has been widely used for exploring
the research hotspots and development trend.
However, there is currently no bibliometric analysis
on digital technology in the health field of older
people. Therefore, this study was to carry a
bibliometric analysis in the area.
2 METHODS
Bibliometric analysis was carried out based on the
Web of Science (WoS) Core Collection, which
ensured the quality of literature. The search terms
were set as follows: (TS= (“Digital Technologies”)
OR TS= (“Technologies, Digital”) OR TS=
(“Technology, Digital”) OR TS= (“Digital
Electronics”) OR TS= (“Electronics, Digital”)) AND
(TS= (“older people”) OR TS= (“aged”) OR TS=
(“elderly”)) AND TS= (“health”). Each paper for
analysis had to fulfill the following criteria: (1) the
types were articles or review articles, (2) were written
in the English language. Only Publications before
2021 were included. Finally, a total of 1619 papers
that were available according to the search criteria
(Fig.1).
290
Le, Y., Cao, S., Wang, M., He, D., Chen, Y., Chen, B. and Zheng, D.
Digital Technology in the Health Field of Older People: Bibliometric Analysis.
DOI: 10.5220/0012020000003633
In Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Biotechnology and Biomedicine (ICBB 2022), pages 290-293
ISBN: 978-989-758-637-8
Copyright
c
 2023 by SCITEPRESS – Science and Technology Publications, Lda. Under CC license (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0)

..
Figure 1: Flowchart of the paper collection and screening
process.
3 RESULTS AND DISCUSSIONS
3.1 Chronological Map of the
Literature
The papers about digital technology in the health field
of older people were published from 2006. The
number of publications shows slow increments from
2006 to 2014, and the growth rate was 26.96%. The
growth rate from 2015 to 2021 was 48.51%, growth
rate = ((number of publications in the last
year/number of publications in the first year)
1/(last year-
first year)
-1)*100. Meanwhile, the publications were
cited with high frequency from 2018 to 2021 and
peaked in 2021 (Fig.2).
3.2 Country Analysis
In total, 1619 articles were collected and analyzed.
Tab.1 shows the country of the most articles was
America (USA), which had 601 articles, accounting
for 37.12%. The number of the articles ranked the
second and third were England and Australia.
American average citations per item (ACI = 19.55)
and H-index (54) were the highest in all country,
which indicates American relevant articles published
were highly influential. USA and Australia did
research firstly on digital technology in the health
field of older people in 2006. Although the related
researches presented late in China, the quality of
Chinese literatures is high according to value of ACI.
3.3 Burst Keywords Analysis
Burst keywords refer to the keywords that appear
frequently in a short time. It indicates research
hotspots for some time and trends in future (Le,
2021). Fig.3 displays the top 10 keywords with the
strongest citation bursts. The strongest burst occurred
in 2008, that internet had a burst strength of 11.1067,
and lasted 8 years. Digital divide and health
information are ranked the second and third
respectively according to burst strength. Some
scholars (Gracia, 2009) think digital technology can
improve health of the elderly, but they could be at risk
of losing out benefits from digital technology because
of digital divide. Mobile technology was considered
to be vital to cease digital divide (Olphert, 2013). In
recent years, the research of digital technology has
been increasingly involved in the field of elderly
health and diverse keywords. It might cause dilution
of the citation bursts.
.
2006 2008 2010 2012 2014 2016 2018 2020
0
100
200
300
400
500
Number of paper
Number of published papers
Year of publication
0
1000
2000
3000
4000
5000
6000
7000
8000
Cited times
Citations
Figure 2. Trends in the growth of the publications and total citation per year
Digital Technology in the Health Field of Older People: Bibliometric Analysis
291

Table 1: Top 10 productive country publishing papers.
Rank Country Quantity (N) Percentage (N/1619) ACI H-index Begin
1 USA 601 37.12 19.55 54 2006
2 England 259 16.00 15.13 31 2008
3 Australia 175 10.81 12.95 25 2006
4 Canada 129 7.97 12.21 22 2010
5 Germany 98 6.05 12.15 18 2013
6 Netherlands 74 4.57 13.00 16 2012
7 Spain 70 4.32 5.77 12 2016
8 Italy 69 4.26 6.77 12 2015
9 Sweden 68 4.20 9.37 13 2009
10 China 62 3.83 16.50 12 2014
a
ACI, average citations per item.
b
Begin, the year of the first literature published.
Figure 3: Top 10 keywords with the strongest citation bursts.
4 CONCLUSION
This study aims to conduct a bibliometric analysis of
digital technology in health field of older people by
CiteSpace software. The findings showed that the
number of relevant publications and citation have
been increasing. The highest number of publications
was conducted in America (37.12%). The keywords
“Internet” and “digital divide” occurred burst in short
term, but researches tend to be diversified in recent
years. In this study, data was only retrieved from
WoS. Therefore, the analysis may limit the
generalizability of the results.
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
This research was supported by the First-class
Discipline Project of Zhejiang province (No.
4065C4011700201), China; First-class Discipline
Project of Qianjiang College of Hangzhou Normal
University (No. 2019JXYL003), China; the Policy
Theory Research Project of Zhejiang Provincial Civil
Affairs Department (No. ZMKT202140), China;
Medical and Health Technology Plan of Zhejiang
Province (No. 2022507615); Department of higher
education, Ministry of education, 2021 industry
university research cooperation and education project
(202102627005); Research project of Zhejiang
Higher Education Association (KT2021191).
ICBB 2022 - International Conference on Biotechnology and Biomedicine
292

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