Background and Objectives
There is a lack of understanding of how older adults’ involvement and participation matters in actual design practice. This systematic literature review investigates existing empirical studies involving older users during the design of technologies and explores the nature and consequences of involving older people.
Research Design and Methods
Our literature review is informed by the guidelines of the PRISMA statement. We examined the included studies by means of thematic content analysis to identify the nature of older users’ involvement and existing evidence on what consequences it has.
Results
In total, 40 empirical studies published in the period 2014–2018 are included in the review. Most empirical studies involve older people from local networks, with underlying stereotypical images and at lower levels of participation. The results reveal three main consequences of involving older users: learning, adjusted design, and an increased sense of participation. Furthermore, we found that user involvement is a structured process whose outcomes are contingent on a range of premises.
Discussion and Implications
Synthesizing the results, we develop the concept of user involvement and present an analytical framework. Our results have implications for researchers and policy makers, since they throw into question the widely held assumption that involving older people inevitably yields beneficial outcomes.
The current paper addresses the implications of doing research on socially assistive robots in real homes. In contrast to laboratory studies, studies of robots in their intended natural environments can provide insights into people's experiences of robots, and if and how a robot becomes embedded and used in people's everyday life. However, moving robots out of the lab and into real life environments poses several challenges. Laboratory methods mainly focus on cause-and-effect relations between independent and dependent variables, while researchers who are conducting studies in real homes have much less control. In home trials, researchers need to decide what kind of data is obtainable and available. In real homes, researchers face unique challenges that require unique and pragmatic approaches. Any single study conducted in a real home is likely to have methodological limitations. Therefore, several different studies using different robots and methods are needed before the results can be converged in order to reach conclusions that are convincingly supported. This paper is an effort to provide such a report on a specific empirical case and converging findings from other studies. The goal is to provide an account of the research challenges and opportunities encountered when introducing a robot into its intended practice: the homes of older people. The aim is to give enough details for other
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