Objective: The study presented in this paper aimed to assess the effect of an Information Technology enabled community gardening program for older adults, developed by an international consortium.
Methods: We have executed a quantitative, pre- and post-test field trial with older adult volunteers to test the proposed programme in two European countries, Italy and Belgium (n=98). We used standardized and ad hoc questionnaires to measure changes in the volunteers' mental and psychological state during the trial. The statistical data analysis sought for differences in the pre- and post-test values of the key scores related to the perceived quality of life and benefits of gardening via paired-samples t-tests, and also tried to identify the important factors of significant changes via logistic regression.
Results: We found significant improvements in the perceived benefits of gardening and also in the scores computed from the WHO Quality of Life instruments, especially in the social sub-domains. The improvements were associated with the country, age, marital state and education of the volunteers. Higher age or being widow, divorced or single increased the odds of a significant improvement in the scores in more than one sub-domains.
Conclusion: Though the two trial settings were different in some aspects, the observed significant improvements generally confirmed the positive effects of gardening concerning the perceived quality of life and benefits of gardening.
Keywords: Field trial; IT-assisted gardening; Mobile apps; Smart sensors; Successful ageing.
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