Abstract: [Purpose/Significance] The purpose of this study is to explore the factors affecting the elderly users' adaptive use of intelligent technology in the digital economy era, and propose the countermeasures for elderly users to improve the adaption to the smart society. [Design/Methodology] Comment content of the Weibo topic #China takes action to break the intelligent gap between the elderly#were taken as data source,the individual adaptive structure theory（IAST）was as the coding framework, the directed content analysis method was adopted to extract the impact factors for adaptive use of intelligent technology among elderly users. [Findings/Conclusion] In our findings, three adaptive behaviors modes among elderly users were identified : the exploratory task adaptation, exploitive technology adaptation and exploitive task adaptation. Eleven factors of three dimensions,including technology, task and individual characteristics, were found to impact the adaptation process and some countermeasures were proposed. [Originality/Value] This study explores the influencing factors of elderly user adaptation to intelligent technology from individual adaptative usage perspective, which sheds lights on the remittance of smart divide and promote the positive adaptation for elderly users.

Key words: Intelligent technology, Adaptive use, Elderly user, Directed content analysis