Utilizing Social Media to Share Knowledge of Healthcare and Improve Subjective Wellbeing of Aging People

In recent decades, many healthcare service providers embrace social media to spread knowledge to the public and communicate with them. However, elderly people are not paid much attention. As we know, more and more countries have to face the challenge of rapidly aging and it is vital to meet their demands of healthcare such as how to manage their chronic diseases by themselves. Information technology (IT) may provide solutions and studies on IT use in different contexts of aging have emerged. However, research relating IT use to healthcare knowledge sharing and wellbeing of aging people is limited. This study aims to examine relations among social media use, healthcare knowledge sharing, and seniors’ wellbeing in the context of China. For this purpose, we use a mixed method to test our conceptual model, which consists of both quasi-experiment and questionnaire survey conducted with retired elderly people. Our research can give healthcare service providers suggestions about how to use social media to increase seniors’ knowledge of self-management and to improve their wellbeing.