Finding linkage between technology and social issues: A literature based discovery approach

With social issues such as aging society and sustainability becoming more concerned than ever as we are heading towards future society, decision makers in both government and private sector need to identify and focus their efforts on promoting key technologies which have significant contribution to these increasingly complex social problems. However, such connections are not easy to trace, thus makes this subject very difficult to be completely understood. Meanwhile, Literature Based Discovery (LBD) has been widely accepted as an effective approach to discover hidden connections from information within bibliographical databases but is still used mainly in medical database. This paper investigates the possibility of broader application of LBD to reveal the linkage between technology and social issue from science and social science citation databases. Robotics and gerontology were selected as an example dataset, and some lexical statistics were used to suggest important connecting terms. The result shows various contributions of robotics to healthcare and well-being of elderly people such as surgery, hearing implant, and rehabilitation. This methodology could offer an alternative approach in creating overview picture of how one technology contributes to a particular social issue and assist in forming policies to promote key technologies towards the future society.