Finding linkage between technology and social issue: A Literature Based Discovery approach

This paper investigates Literature Based Discovery (LBD) approach to reveal linkages between technology and social issue to elucidate plausible contribution of science and technology for solving social issues. Robotics and gerontology were selected as an example in our analysis. The result shows various technological options of robotics contributing to healthcare and well-being of elderly people, mainly in surgery, rehabilitation, and companionship. In addition, we comparatively evaluated effectiveness of semantic similarity measures to extract these linkages from bibliographic database. Our methodology can be utilized as a decision support tool for managers and policy makers to extract and design promising research targets.