Active and Assisted Living (AAL) technologies aim to enhance the quality of life of older adults and promote successful aging. While video-based AAL solutions offer rich capabilities for better healthcare management in older age, they pose significant privacy risks. To mitigate the risks, we developed a video-based monitoring system that incorporates different privacy-preserving filters. We deployed the system in one assistive technology center and conducted a qualitative study with older adults and other stakeholders involved in care provision. Our study demonstrates diverse users’ perceptions and experiences with video-monitoring technology and offers valuable insights for the system’s further development. The findings unpack the privacy-versus-safety trade-off inherent in video-based technologies and discuss how the privacy-preserving mechanisms within the system mitigate privacy-related concerns. The study also identifies varying stakeholder perspectives towards the system in general and highlights potential avenues for developing video-based monitoring technologies in the AAL context.

Privacy is a very complex concept that concerns all areas of human activity. Even more so, it has acquired whole new importance and has become a hot-button topic in the era of ubiquitous computing. The emergence of Active and Assisted Living (AAL) technologies is offering the improvement of the quality of life and maintaining the independence of older adults in their preferred environment. Especially with the advancement of computer vision, video-based technological solutions are giving us promising results but bring along significant risks of privacy violation. With this qualitative study, we aim to explore older adults’ understanding of privacy as a construct and their privacy considerations for technology-based monitoring applications in eldercare, for video-based systems among them. Exploratory interview sessions were conducted with 12 older adults 66 and plus of age living in care homes and in private households. Findings indicate that the concept of privacy is indeed difficult to understand and define for older adults. However, the context of video monitoring elicits clear privacy concerns. The nudity aspect of privacy was proved to be the most important among the participants, yet, the attitudinal shift in the perception of nudity was observed in older adults living in care homes. Eight out of 12 interviewed older adults did not like the idea of having a camera-based assistive technology, however, some of their worries were alleviated after explaining to them the possible technology’s inherent privacy-preserving techniques.