Human Aspects of IT for the Aged Population. Design for Aging

The more experience we get of involving older people in innovation and design processes, the more we recognize the benefits of having to do with life experience as input to the development of digital products and services. Heterogeneity raises personalization as a key component in design. This paper argues that old people are an asset in innovation processes, which is illustrated by projects conducted in Sweden from 1992 to 2014. The aim is to present how older people contribute to the development and what hinders them. The goal of these projects was to promote participation of older people during the design process but to varying degrees depending on the question. Different degrees of participation and involvement are discussed based on the “participation ladder”, on an idea of Arnstein from 1969 and on conclusions from innovation research.

There are different techniques (e.g. direct or indirect observation, questionnaires, etc.) with which it is possible to estimate user experience. Biometric data obtained with different devices (e.g. EEG, EMG) have been used as a source to infer user experience. In this work, as part of the construction of an evaluation model of user experience, we present a preliminary study that seeks to identify emotions using records of brain electrical activity through the visualisation of preset images that stimulate emotions known a priori. The results include identifying emotions of joy and displeasure through brain activity using the Emotive device in older adults.

This paper describes the strengths and weaknesses of the Scenario-based Design as a method to achieve a user-centered development of technology for the elderly. Our assumptions are based on findings from a three-year research project dedicated to the application of service robotics in a stationary nursing home. In summary, the increasingly specific nature of the phases during the design process afford a needs-based technical development, thus providing a good basis for participatory technical development. Nonetheless, some weak points were identified during the case study. They are related to the graphic nature of the scenarios as well as following the users’ notions in each and every case. In consideration of the difficulties that arose during the use of Scenario-based Design, we conclude with some suggestion for future applications of this method.

Society ages and our already extensive use of a host of different portable devices continues to expand. No leap of the imagination is needed to grasp that an exponential growth of the eHealth market is at hand. While the ageing of the baby boomers will have an impact on the global economy as a whole, of particular interest is the impact this will have within the context of eHealth market development. We wish to clarify and raise the level of awareness about how older age identity is constructed in the marketer-consumer dialectic within the eHealth context and how the

personas

method can be used from a

cultural age

perspective. Our focus is on the process of third agers becoming eHealth consumers. We present an analytical framework for future studies aiming to analyze eHealth offerings. This will allow us to gain insight into the process of constructing the third age eHealth consumer group’s identity through multimodal communicative acts, as is the case in advertising, or in settings requiring interactivity, such as the service design process. It is through these multimodal acts that new eHealth offerings could be marketed to the third age eHealth consumer, focusing especially on both the written and visual language used. Our approach is meant to offer an alternative to studies in which ageing has mostly drawn upon the chronological age concept and where marketing has not been seen as a discursive practice shaping consumers’ identities.

There is a lack of cognitive capability data in design. Existing capability databases lack consideration of older people who are suffering decline of cognitive capabilities. To explore older people’s cognitive capability data for the design context, two pilot studies were conducted: a small-scale cognitive capability survey in China, and a study of a group of industrial designers’ needs regarding user data. A Framework of user data were developed and key issues for cognitive capability data collection and application in design were identified and discussed.

This research aims to explore how to bring the richness of tangible interaction designs into the everyday living and working contexts of the aged users. To do so, we introduced an interactive technology design at two Chinese Universities, for the first time interactive prototyping skills become important for their undergraduate and graduate students to learn and practice. In an interactive prototyping course, a number of prototypes designed for aged users were built and experienced. From these prototypes, experiences for regularly running interaction design education based on traditional industrial design education were discussed.

Communicating with older people is more challenging because of age-related cognitive and sensory impairments. How to develop an approach to enable inexperienced and young designers to effectively communicate with older people? A new and pragmatic framework is developed which aims to identify key factors of communication techniques that designers need to learn. This framework can help designers to decide which techniques are most relevant for specific conversation situations. It can also be used to systematically collect communication knowledge and skills as a designer’s personal communication guidance.

People retiring now differ greatly in knowledge, motivation, attitudes towards and use of digital music-related technologies to younger generations or their predecessors. This paper reviews the methods that have been used to investigate why people use music-related technologies, how they use them and why. Using a lens provided by social cognitive theory it identifies future themes for research into music and ageing. Hopefully, these analyses will inform the design of future music related technologies for people at the transition to retirement, and the elderly.

Good design should be equipped with the quality of being accessible to broad user groups, including older people. As the population becomes older, the needs and capabilities of people become ever more diverse. However, there exists limited effective data for designers to understand older people’s capability condition. The lack of good data becomes a great barrier to make design accessible to older people. This paper introduces a pilot study of collecting older people’s multiple capability data in China. It aims to explore principles and instructions to design the process, methods and testing tasks of such a study. The results show that in the pilot study, (1) there are discrepancies between users’ self-assessment and performance measurement, (2) the selection of products should take into account the cultural context, and (3) ceiling effects exist and they greatly affect the validity and reliability of the data.

Given the importance and abundance of current visual information, visual display designs should consider their accessibility to elderly people. However, adapting designs not only to young users but also to older users is difficult because the difference in perception and cognition between these age groups remains unclear. In order to solve this accessible design issue, we introduce three studies: a study on the effect of aging on visibility, the construction of a database containing the sensory characteristics of older persons and persons with disabilities, and experimental and conceptual studies of our proposed design method, the time reduction design. The time reduction design method can solve the cognitive problems of aging societies by improving both spatial visibility and recognition speed.

This paper presents an ongoing project using participatory design methods to develop design concepts for socially assistive robots (SARs) with older adults diagnosed with depression and co-occurring physical illness. We frame SARs development in the context of preventive patient-centered healthcare, which empowers patients as the primary drivers of health and aims to delay the onset of disease rather than focusing on treatment. After describing how SARs can be of benefit in this form of healthcare, we detail our participatory design study with older adults and therapists aimed at developing preventive SARs applications for this population. We found therapists and older adults to be willing and able to participate in assistive robot design, though hands-on participation was a challenge. Our findings suggest that important areas of concern for older adults with depression are social interaction and companionship, as well as technologies that are easy to use and require minimal intervention.

Typical design approaches for technology interventions for seniors tends to focus on specialized design to accommodate functional limitations associated with either disability or aging. This paper will propose universal design as an alternative approach that focuses on design for all users, regardless of age or ability. Moreover, while specialized design is based on prescriptive requirements that often dictate what to design, universal design is an approach to technology intervention that is guided by a set of performance principles and guidelines that provide a rationale for how to design technologies. As such, universal design as extends the usability of everyday design to seniors, without the need for special adaptations or devices.

A Swedish Living Lab has recently been established offering care organizations a test and evaluation method as an activity in their intrinsic development process. Using the method, innovations for an aging population are assessed, guided by quality criteria as well-being, dignity, value for the elderly and usability.

This paper describes the method through a pilot test, carried out in November 2014 by the elderly themselves and health and social care staff at a nursing home together with different academic parts in a multidisciplinary test process. The method allows for interaction between innovators and stakeholders as well as potential end-users in the elderly care sector. Simultaneously, the users’ quality aspects are kept in focus when innovations for the aging society are tested.

In recent years, there has been an increasing interest in Ambient Assisted Living technology to support older adults. Research and industry are working jointly on reliable and suitable solutions to help older adults to remain healthy and safe while living independently. Appropriate interaction methods play an important role for the acceptance of such supporting systems. Today, solutions mainly rely on common and well-evaluated interaction techniques such as TV remotes or touch screens to enhance the usability. Projects presented in this work are based on the same interaction techniques, but additionally enrich the interaction experience with a real-time, empathic virtual assistance avatar. In this paper, we present evaluation settings and user involvement results acquired from three different Ambient Assisted Living projects focusing on avatar-based user interaction. Our results show that avatar-based interaction in the Ambient Assisted Living context is very well applicable, especially when combined with speech recognition.

There are many software requirements for the development of accessible applications, in particular for elderly people or people with disabilities. In particular, user interfaces have to be sufficiently abstract to cover required adaptations. In this paper, we introduce a gamification approach for teaching, connecting and engaging developers on accessible design of applications. A particular challenge hereby is combining gamification patters with the requirements of accessibility. As many gamification patters build on visual representation or usage metaphors, they are not suited for adaptation. Instead, we derive a representation-agnostic set of gamification patters from actual game design of commercial games. We identify and illustrate five categories of representation-agnostic gamification patterns, based on a games survey: action space, reward, challenge, progress, and discovery.

ICT have been moving rapidly into people’s lives nowadays. Even if living without access to ICT would be a barrier in the past, today access to ICT is required for most education, employment, and commerce, and is increasingly required for travel, health, safety, daily living and participation in most of our society. In this paper we present the evaluation of an all-inclusive ICT infrastructure from the perspective of different type of users that use it for different purposes based on their abilities, needs and preferences.

Our research aims to investigate the relationship between the young elderly (65–74 years old) and use of technologies [

1

], and to explore active ageing and the role played by media and ICTs in building a friendly and positively domestic environment for the elderly in their everyday life [

2

]. Hence the use of ICTs by the elderly takes into account two different perspectives: (1) Generational approach: the young elderly are here considered by looking at the role played by their generational identity in shaping their media use [

3

]. (2) Domestication and Leisure: Media consumption is spatially and temporally located and media uses and routines are shared within the household and are enabled by processes of domestication [

4

]. The project is based on an theoretical study about ageing, a preliminary survey with a representative sample of the Italian “young elderlies” regarding ICTs equipment and usage (N = 900), (3) 20 family in-depth interviews in Milan area.

Information and communication technologies (ICT) play a substantial role for enhancing participation and autonomy in old age. In Germany, as in most modern industrialized societies, huge diffusion gaps between younger and older age groups exist regarding the use of the internet and ICT devices. Very few studies address the differential role of older “frontrunners” in terms of modern ICT. In this project, we address patterns of ICT use and competence beliefs among “senior technology experts” (N = 108; aged 51–81,

M

= 68.37), who took part in a German initiative to help older novice users with ICT, and explore the associations with psychological constructs such as self-efficacy and obsolescence. Findings suggest a strong relationship of two self-efficacy measures and perceived obsolescence with usage patterns and competence ratings. Insights on usage patterns, perceived competence and associations with psychological constructs are discussed, as they may help improve the understanding of early technology adopters among older adults with implications for research and practice.

We analyze the influence of age on mobile computer anxiety in a sample of 158 individuals 55+ by means of path analysis modeling. Taking as the endogenous variable a mobile computer anxiety scale (MCAS, Wang 2007), models include demographic and socioeconomic variables and a computer experience scale – based on the familiarity and frequency of use of different information and communication technologies. Results confirm a positive influence of age on mobile computer anxiety which is mediated by both socio-economic variables and computer experience. The influence of age on mobile computer anxiety is comparatively low. Age is not the relevant dimension to explain computer anxiety, as socio-economic background and computer experience have higher explanatory capacity. This result may explain the inconsistent results regarding the direct relationship between age and computer anxiety available in the literature.

Since the early 20

th

century, population ageing and technological developments have developed apace. Many social changes took place, including the development of digital technologies and the ageing of populations worldwide. The purpose of this paper is to explore the implications of these two phenomena and to think about how certain values and may be drawn upon to help make technologies work better for older people as both technology markets and worldwide demographic profiles continue to evolve.

In this paper, we reflect upon our participation in a pilot digital literacy project titled InterACTion currently being deployed in low-income housing for seniors the city of Montreal. To assess the complexities of access with respect to ageing in this real world setting, we draw upon Clement and Shade’s ‘Access Rainbow Model.’ We use the InterACTion project as a case study and formulate seven lessons that we have gleaned in the carrying out of the project, each of them working to display intricacies of access within a context of precarious ageing and situated engagements with technologies. Our interest in drawing from the model lies in our understanding of access a multi-layered concept that relies both on the establishment of technical requirements and on a host of entangled conditions that are crucial in determining an individual’s ability to use digital technologies.

This study reviews the research articles about the use of IT for older adults’ from 2009–2015. As result, fourteen articles published in peer reviewed journals are reviewed.

Prior studies have shown that while older adults use web or e-service, they tend to rely on user accessibility guidelines or friendly web appearance. For instance, older people have difficulty reading text presentations more than younger readers. Inappropriate design decisions might create barriers for older people. However, this causality might not be entirely resulting from age. This study found that the usage experience of e-service is also strongly associated with the requirements of web quality for users as well. The empirical study was conducted on a sample of 318 users of using web services. The results reveal that the requirements of web quality (including web appearance, context quality, and technical adequacy) between older and younger adults are not significantly different. Instead, users with low usage experience require greater web quality than experienced users.

Objectives: Issues surrounding aging and information communication technologies (ICTs) are of critical importance. This study aims to identify the determinants of the acceptance of ICTs innovations by older adults, and discuss the research gap in the gerontechnology literature.

Methods: Research articles were selected from four multi-disciplinary databases (SCOPUS, ProQuest, EBSCOHOST, Science Direct) from 2004 to 2015. Articles were filtered by “Older than 55”, “healthy”, “acceptance”, “ICTs”, etc. Finally, a total of 29 papers including qualitative, quantitative and mixed-method research are used in this study.

Results: The majority of these studies indicated that older adults have a positive attitude towards using ICTs. The findings summarized ICTs-related technologies in five basic domains: Intelligent monitoring, Health care delivery, Online services, Social communication, and Internet & Computer. The review gathered and classified important acceptance factors into six themes: Perceived Benefits of Use, Subjective Norm, Perceived Behavior Control, Perceived Usability, Affections, and Socio-demographic Mediators.

Walker-use among older adults is often avoided because of the stigma of using one. Drawing on the appraisal theory of stress, we argue that stigma associated with walker-use is subject to various cognitive appraisals that affect whether the user sees the walker as stigmatizing and the extent to which they can cope with that stigma. We followed a participatory design approach to involve older adults in the design of an intelligent walker. One of the activities was to conduct focus groups to explore the role of the aesthetic design of the product in acceptance and use of such walkers. Qualitative analysis of these focus groups provides data explaining the ways in which potential users assess stigma and coping resources. We emphasise that while better design of walkers is important, tackling the self-stigma of users and increasing their ability to cope with using one is equally important.

Computer systems have the potential to assist older adults by supporting independence, enhancing social communication, and enabling healthcare activities. Yet older adults’ adoption rates continue to lag behind younger and middle-aged adults. We report data from 249 older adult computer users (65–93 years of age) that identify the details of their perceptions of computer usefulness for a range of everyday activities. Participants rated the importance of activities to their quality of life and the usefulness of current computer systems for supporting those activities. These experienced computer users indicated that computers were meeting their needs for some activities (e.g., social communication, games) but not for other activities (e.g., calendaring, healthcare, recreation and learning). Our data provide guidance for (a) introducing the potential of computer systems to current non-users and (b) designing systems targeted to meet the needs of older adults and enhancing computing functionality for them.

The goals of this study are two-fold: (1) To develop a novel concept of a light system with the use of Near Field Communication (NFC)-enabled technology, Bluetooth and Raspberry-PI. This new system is known as NFC Light System (NLS). (2) To set up an experimental design to examine the influence of perceived usefulness and perceived ease of use on older adults’ behavioral intention to use the NLS. Our proposed system was empirically tested with 33 older adults in Malaysia. Our findings show that perceived ease of use appears to be the primary factor for the older adults to use the NLS. Interestingly, perceived usefulness was not a significant predictor of older adults’ behavioral intention to use the NLS. From the practical viewpoint, this study offers a new insight for gerontechnology manufacturer and developers to focus their design efforts on easy-to-use attribute that are desired by older adults.

The increasing penetration of renewable energies influences and changes the transmission task of electricity in Germany. However, the planning and construction of new lines is met with resistance from the public. To address public concerns adequately, a tailored information and communication concept is needed, for which knowledge about acceptance-relevant factors for different user groups is indispensable. In this paper we explore acceptance-relevant attributes in the context of electricity pylons contrasting attitudes of older and younger persons. Results of a conjoint study indicate that both age groups basically have comparable acceptance levels, but younger persons were found to be more sensitive with regard to distance of the pylon and possible health effects. Additionally, acceptance patterns similar to those for cell tower location were found, which implies that the analyzed attributes are not only stable across demographic groups but also across technologies.

Social networking sites offer a number of benefits; however a large amount of elder adults still do not engage in these types of sites due to usability issues and a lack of understanding of Web 2.0 concepts. To alleviate these issues, a social networking site interface was redesigned to accommodate elders so that they can reap the benefits of social media. Following a three phased usability study, 22 elder adults utilized a redesigned website incorporating web standards and additional usability and accessibility considerations. With the use of the redesigned prototype, does it improve accessibility and usability for elder adults? What tasks improved in terms of success rates and task performance? How do the elders perceive the newly redesigned prototype? The preliminary findings of this study show that usability and accessibility for elder adults improved when utilizing the redesigned social networking site. In addition, elder adults had a more positive perception of these types of sites after using the redesigned prototype.

The ability to use information and communication technologies (ICT) is becoming a necessity. Older users are one of the fastest growing segment of ICT users but many still face barriers in ICT use. Libraries are one of the first places that individuals turn to when looking for information or assistance with ICT. Libraries also serve as an important resource for individuals to access the Internet. However, libraries face several problems in providing services to elders. Lack of funding and trained staff, insufficient knowledge about accessibility prevents them from successfully serving their patrons. We present the Library-GPII-System, a cloud based auto-personalization system that will enable libraries to successfully serve their older patrons. Results from our library stakeholder needs analyses are also presented.

The phenomenon of banner blindness has concerned researchers, advertisers and website publishers during these years. In order to alleviate the phenomenon, this study attempted to develop a banner recommendation system which could arrange banners according the relative salience of keywords on a webpage viewed by a user. The prototypical system are being developed, however, we have made an initial examination on the effectiveness of its banner recommendation functionality. It was found that two recommendation accuracies for the system calculated with two different criteria both were significantly higher than the probability by chance.

Due to the overlapping requirements with people with disabilities, elders can benefit from accessible web design and the use of assistive technologies. But elderlies face also semantic problems that are derived from different perception models or the mere anxiety of using new technologies, which can’t be evaluated by accessibility guideline conformance only. Tackling those semantic issues calls for more user-centered evaluation. The Global Public Inclusive Infrastructure (GPII) provides user interface adaptation based on peoples individual needs and preferences. These preferences are stored in so-called preference sets and can also contain sematic settings. In this paper, we propose an accessibility evaluation method, using the preference sets of the GPII to derive authentic accessibility requirements. Hereby, we’re able to carry out tests according to guideline conformance and semantic requirements. In this context, we propose a personalized accessibility evaluation approach based on original user preferences that addresses the need for a user-centered evaluation.

This study focuses on older adults’ usage of web pages. An experiment consisted of three information structures (the net structure, the tree structure, and the linear structure) was conducted to investigate effects of information structure (IS) on older adult’s performance. Three findings were found. First, the number of clicks was the fewest in the net-structure web page among three web pages. Older participants spent less time to complete the tasks in the linear-structure web page than the other two web pages. The number of clicks and the accuracy of participants answered the questions in the tree-structure web page were the highest among three web pages. Second, older participants’ performance of card sorting was positively correlated with the task completion time. And there was a positive correlation between spatial ability and the performance of older participants. Third, older participants showed the highest preference of the linear structure among three information structures. They always lost task targets in the tree-structure web page, especially when they needed to transfer from one branch of the tree structure to another branch. This indicated that a simple IS was better used and understood by older participants than a complicated one.

The aim of this study is to understand perceived barriers for older adults to select novel shopping channel. Questionnaire survey was employed. Innovation resistance theory is served as the theoretical base for this study. Five innovativeness acceptance barriers (usage barrier, value barrier, risk barrier, traditional barrier, and image barrier) and three business models (online shopping oriented vs. TV shopping oriented vs. hybrid) were investigated. 108 valid respondents who are older than 50 years old and have online shopping experience participated in this study. The major results including: (1) The order of the barriers for older adults to adopt novel shopping business models is risk barrier, traditional barrier, image barrier, usage barrier, and value barrier. (2) There exist significant (p < 0.01) different in traditional barrier and image barrier among different business models. (3) Value barrier, risk barrier, and traditional barrier have significant (p < 0.05) impact on novel shopping business models acceptance.

Some cognitive declines commonly occur with aging; yet they are seldom taken into account by Website designers and User Experience (UX) researchers. In this empirical study, we compared younger adults, middle-age adults, high-functioning older adults, and low-functioning older adults to examine whether there is a relationship between aspects of cognition and performance when using a Website. Performance was measured by accuracy (percent of tasks completed successfully), efficiency (mean time to complete tasks) and self-rated satisfaction, three commonly used usability metrics. Results suggest that processing speed and vocabulary may be related to Internet performance. Specifically, older adults with faster processing speed and/or high vocabulary may perform better than their lower-functioning counterparts. More importantly, these older adults perform similar to younger adults.

Successful use of ICT requires domain knowledge and interaction knowledge. It shapes and is shaped by the use of ICT and is less common among older adults. This paper focus on the validation of the computer literacy scale (CLS) introduced by [

14

]. The CLS is an objective knowledge test of ICT-related symbols and terms commonly used in the graphical user interface of interactive computer technology. It has been designed specifically for older adults with little computer knowledge and is based on the idea that knowing common symbols and terms is as necessary for using computers, as it is for reading and writing letters and books. In this paper the Computer literacy scale is described and compared with related measures for example computer expertise (CE), Computer Proficiency (CPQ) and computer anxiety (CATS). In addition criterion validity is described with predictions of successful ICT use exemplified with (1) the use of different data entry methods and (2) the use of different ticket vending machine (TVM) designs.

This paper draws on an empirical investigation of how older people are represented on the websites providing social care service information in the inner London Boroughs. My research questions follow the work of Loos [

1

,

2

] on the relationship between representations of older age, information accessibility and access to digital services. Mirroring Loos and reflecting the specificities of the fieldwork my investigation found older people were largely invisible as a diverse group of citizens in the emerging cultures of digital public service. The images of older adults were few and lacked diversity. Inner London has an ethnically and culturally diverse population yet older adults were commonly represented though images of frail white women. The paper highlights representational politics of older age in digital public service information provision and their consequences for access and social inclusion; intra-generational diversity; ageism as a prevalent form of social discrimination.

Prosperity4All is a continuous and dynamic paradigm shift towards an e-inclusion framework building on the architectural and technical foundations of other Global Public Inclusive Infrastructure (GPII) projects aiming to create a self-sustainable and growing ecosystem where developers, implementers, consumers, prosumers and other directly and indirectly actors (e.g. teachers, carers, clinicians) may play a role in its viability and diversity. An agile and dynamic approach is adopted in three evaluation phases, starting with formative evaluations with five internal implementers leading to more summative techniques towards the final evaluation phase where more (n = 25) and external professionals will use the tools and resources available in the project’s repository (DeveloperSpace) to improve and enhance their own products and services. The evaluation approach for the implementers considers three dimensions: (a) the project’s Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), (b) technical validation activities prior evaluation, and (c) three evaluation phases followed by a final impact assessment.

Mark Zuckerberg founded Facebook site in 2004, and open to e-mail applications use in 2006. The global active users of the Facebook site surpassed one billion people on September 14th, 2012. It spent 13 years that the users of the Google site founded in 1998 surpassed one billion people in 2011. It spent 8 years that the Facebook site to do so. The official statistics of the Facebook site represented that there are about 15 million users visited the Facebook site monthly and there are about 12 million people visited the site by using the mobile Internet devices in the fourth quarter of 2013 in Taiwan. In the same time, there are about 11 million users visited the Facebook site daily and there are about 8.5 million people visited the site by using the mobile Internet devices in Taiwan. Taiwan is a mature market for the Facebook site, the website penetration is the highest in the world.

Taiwan in where the Facebook site utility rate is so high faces the rapidly aging population issue. According to the statistics from Ministry of the Interior, Republic of China, the ratio of the population over 65 years old has exceeded 7 % in 1993. It means that Taiwan is the aging society. The ratio of the population over 65 years old is 11.90 % in October, 2014. With the statistics from Council for Economic Planning and Development in the Republic of China Executive Yuan, the ratio of Taiwan elderly population will exceed 14 % in 2018, and Taiwan will be the aged society. The ratio of Taiwan elderly population will increase quickly from 2014 to 2025 because of the effect of the postwar baby boom.

This investigation using action research discusses the elderly people studying IT lessons in the Senior Citizens Academy of a city in Taiwan. How do they use the Facebook site? We found that the elderly people is not the main usage group of the Facebook site, but using the Facebook site impacts positively for their learning, social networking, and the interactions among their family members. There are two difficulties for elderly people to use the Facebook site, one reason is they are not used to share their thinking to others, and the other reason is the computer operation is difficult for them. We also found that some of the elderly people begin to use the mobile Internet devices what are new things for them, and they use the internet, the Facebook site, Line by making use of the mobile Internet devices.

The aim of this paper is to consider the use and role of new media in the lives of older people. To this end, I focus on the social images of encounters between older people and new media. My focus is two-fold; on the one hand, I aim at opening the academic discussion on new media and older people to societal and structural considerations; on the other, I make an argument about the use of discourse, critical discourse analysis in particular, approaches to understand the main discourses that frame the experience of older people with new media. Thus, in this paper I question taken for granted assumptions regarding the inherent characteristics of older people that prevent them from entering the social media space. I draw on the concept of ageism to discuss the implications of this for an individual, older social media user.

In this work culture-specific and cross-cultural influences on frequency of use of media and trust in media for B-2-B communication purposes were explored, taking Brazil and Germany as exemplary countries. Using an online survey, 236 respondents from Brazil and Germany were examined regarding their professional media usage. Findings show both culture-specific as well as cultural insensitive media usage in B-2-B communication. Brazilians use new media more frequently than Germans. However, it was also revealed that cross-cultural variables as age, gender and technical self-efficacy influence even more significantly the frequency of use of media. Furthermore, trust in media for B-2-B communication showed to positively correlated with the frequency of use of media in both countries.

Websites and web applications that require user input via web forms can be a usability barrier for elderly users if not designed carefully. This issue is even compounded by a broad diversity of needs and preferences as observed in this group of users. In this paper, we report about a current study in which we prototypically implemented and empirically evaluated four exemplary patterns of user interface adaptation. These patterns allow for dynamic substitution and/or augmentation of user interface parts at runtime, with the goal of improving the individual usability for an elderly user in a specific use context. This approach could eventually lead to highly personalized web forms within GPII and URC enabled infrastructures.

Older people’s attitude towards mobile communication constitutes a privileged perspective for analyzing domestication processes of digital technologies. By means of a qualitative case study conducted in Italy, we study older users’ motivations and usage practices. We focus on perceptions of mobile phones, adoption and domestication of mobile phones, as well as on usage skills. Participants, aged 60 to 95 years old, typically started to make use of mobile telephony in mid 1990 s and they mainly described a utilitarian approach to the mobile device even though there are cases of anthropomorphization. With a variety of profiles, from assisted to advanced users, those not having smartphones sometimes see touchscreen as challenging. They describe different learning strategies, which are shaped by personal interests. Finally, some participants adopt more sophisticated devices while others decide to slow down their relationship with mobile phones.

This research aims to investigate the differences in the adoption of smartphones between middle aged adults and older adults in China. Based on a literature review from previous research, a research model with eight research hypotheses was developed by extending UTAUT with a consideration of observability and compatibility from IDT, and perceived enjoyment and price value. This research model was empirically examined using survey data from 196 middle aged adults and 146 older adults respectively from China. The findings indicated that the effects of perceived enjoyment, compatibility, and observability on users’ intention to use smartphones were significant, but no age differences between middle aged adults and older age adults were found to exist. Furthermore, the findings also identified age-related differences in the use and adoption of smartphones. The effects of performance expectancy and social influence on users’ intention to use smartphones were moderated by age, such that it was significant for older adults but insignificant for middle aged adults.

Usability, particularly ease-of-use, is a main factor affecting the acceptance of technologies by older adults. Mobile devices offer great possibilities for well-being applications, but they are often equipped with touchscreen. In order to evaluate the ease-of-use of tactile interaction, this study compares the performances of 16 novice (mean age 74) and 8 experienced older adults (mean 75) during the execution of drag-and-drop interaction for achieving tactile puzzle games on smartphone and tablet, with pen and fingers. Results show that novice users were able accomplish interaction accurately with longer times but no significant difference of errors of accuracy.

Age-related differences were investigated in a usability study of an application developed for U.S. Census Bureau enumerators to collect survey data and automate their time and expenses. Accuracy, efficiency and satisfaction measures were collected as participants used a smartphone to answer typical tasks. Usability flaws were also identified with the application. Results indicate that in general there were no differences with task accuracy and efficiency when comparing all tasks, however when looking at individual tasks, the task that had the most usability flaws also revealed age-related differences for accuracy and efficiency – that is older adults were less accurate and took longer to complete. Surprisingly, there were age-related differences with the user satisfaction of the application such that older adults were less satisfied with the application than younger adults. Tying age-related differences to usability flaws highlights the importance of designing optimal applications for all users.

Research in recent years has focused on examining the acceptance as well as the appropriation of technologies amongst older adults, especially in how technologies alleviate issues of functional declines, loneliness, and financial difficulties brought about by ageing. Yet such studies have often overlooked meaningful appropriation or disappropriation of technologies amongst older adults. By drawing on a longitudinal study of ten older adults who were given a smartphone under a corporate social responsibility program by a telecommunications company, we followed the use of smartphones by ten older adult users using in-depth interviews lasting one to two hours each. Our findings revealed a mix of appropriation and disappropriation, which are linked to everyday technological use and routines, attitudes to technology, and social support.

New technologies remain little used by the elderly and their impact is not sufficiently evaluated. Our research aims to evaluate the potential benefits associated to the use of communication tools and specifically with digital applications on touch pad. The present research compared the ability to use a fixed or mobile phone and a touchpad, by 25 young adults and 25 older people, living in the community and without neurological or psychiatric history. Compared to younger adults, aging people produce more commission errors and need more assistance to correct themselves, especially for the most recent technologies. The data appear to validate a hierarchical assistance model to help aging people using technological communication tools. They should be better assisted in a strategic way, using reinsurance and specific cueing. The results also indicate that the combination of a specific observation grid for standardized daily living tasks is especially sensitive to evaluate autonomy loss in aging.

In this paper, the authors support the idea that tablet is the ideal tool to assist and enhance the elderly living by providing them with value-added services. Currently the risk is that a poor design interface may exclude this substantial part of the population from using useful technologies because of their specific age category requirements. So, after an analysis of the related academic literature and an assessment both of elderly needs and tablet limits and potential, the authors select a set of considerations and suggestions for the design of tablet applications for elderly, in order to facilitate the interaction.

This article is aimed to design new hand gesture mode of smartphone for better used by the elderly. The method first use focus grouping to find out the most difficult use hand gestures for the elderly. Secondly, we develop new gesture mode with one-finger gesture. Finally, we compare the traditional gesture with new design gesture mode. Results show that (1) use two fingers as gesture are the most difficult for the elderly; (2) new design mode are better than traditional mode statistically significant in usability evaluation. Accordingly, we suggest the new design gesture mode may be as one solution to substitute the traditional gesture mode for the elderly.

Whether in the developed or developing countries, aging of population has been a common global trend. With the development of the communication technology and the Internet era of prosperity, the elderly people also inevitably need to use modern communication products such as mobile phone so that they could keep contact with their family, children, the outside world, including quick call in case of an emergency etc. But the physiology and psychology of the elderly are very different from the young people, which mainly is reflected in the degradation of vision, hearing, touch, reaction ability, hand strength, text and graphics memory ability and so on. Thus when the elderly people are using the mobile phone there are a lot of inconvenience and special requirements by them and the user experience is also far different form the other age groups. Therefore, in the design of the mobile phone for the older age groups whether the appearance design or the interaction design should reflect on our care for this special group, to improve the usability of the product, to bring convenience for them. This paper firstly studies the physiological and psychological characteristics of the elderly. Then it analyses the behavior characteristics of the elderly in the use of mobile phone and the user experience. Moreover some principles and methods of interaction design for the elderly mo-bile phone are presented in this essay; Additionally through several practical cases of the mobile phone design for the elderly in China and by using the research method such as the user behavior analysis, user survey, Analysis of the availability of products, product evaluation, this paper will analyze and summarize the shortcomings of the current mo-bile phone for the elderly in interaction design. Finally this paper will not only point out the direction of improvement for the elderly mobile interaction design but also provide some useful suggestions and enlightenment for the elderly mobile phone design in the future.