Oral

Older adults in rural area face specific challenges in disease management and health care. There are five presentations in this session, including: a University/Community collaborative project was to develop and evaluate a caregiver education program implemented via an iPad application; a study to compare cortisol and its associations with concurrent depressive symptoms in older adults living in Santa Cruz, in an underdeveloped region of North East Brazil to that in older adults living in middle class St-Bruno, in Quebec, Canada; a study to examine the trend in CRC screening among rural and urban areas between 2000 and 2005; and whether the rural-urban disparity was reduced after the expansion of Medicare coverage; as well as a study to assess the formal and informal care networks of rural older adults and their helpers, as well as a discussion about some preliminary findings regarding using tele-health to affect cardiovascular outcomes in rural areas.

Session Objectives: 1. Discuss implications for future development of mobile technology with rural caregivers of the elderly. 2. Examine and discuss differences in cortisol, a biological stress marker and its association with depressive symptoms in two samples of older adults living in Canada and in Brazil. 3. Assess the informal care networks of rural older adults. 4. Demonstrate a tele-health CHF disease management approach that can be applied to other conditions and geographic settings.