4.1. Subjects

The subjects covered in the seven original papers were 264 Finnish people (131 women and 132 men, the gender of one subject was not known). The subjects can be divided into two groups (Tables 2 and 3): 143 elderly people aged 65 years and over (81 females and 62 males) and 121 younger people (50 females and 70 males) in different occupations and patients of health care centres. The elderly subjects were mostly healthy for their age, at least with respect to their muscoloskeletal system. The subjects were mainly from Northern Finland. Only the farmers (I_a) and nurses (VI_b) were from Eastern Finland.

The elderly subjects participated in the substudies on a voluntary basis. They were chosen randomly (paper VI) or recruited through contacts in parties for the elderly (papers I, II, III, IV and V). The subjects were considered to constitute a good enough cohort for evaluating the products in question. The subjects other than the elderly were chosen as follows: all the nurse students attending a gerontechnology lecture and gerontechnology experts for the gerontechnology projects carried out at the Work Science Laboratory (paper VI), the farmers who had bought a new tractor within the past three years in the Kuopio region (paper I), and all of the patients at the Sodankylä health care centre, who were given a questionnaire on the videoconferencing system used in telemedicine (one third of them returned it) (paper VII).