IT Assisted Gardening for the Revitalization of the Elderly: The Turntable Solution

Serious leisure gardening has proven a viable means to support ‘successful aging’, a major challenge for developed countries. The paper presents the concept of a new IT-assisted gardening system, Turntable, based on a wireless soil sensor and a mobile app. Besides supporting gardening activities, the system includes social features like messaging and posting that allow users to create a community. The system was tested in a small-scale field trial (n = 19) in Italy. All except one of the 10 standardized scores measuring the mental/social state of the participants were found to improve during the use of the system, but out of these only the changes of QOL_OLD, MoCA, and GARDEN instruments were significant at the p = 0.05 level. The first results of the study seem to support the startup hypothesis that IT-assisted gardening can effectively support the revitalization of the elderly. Other trial groups in other countries and other seasons are planned to confirm these promising results.