kommTUi – A Design Process for a Tangible Communication Technology with Seniors

Tangible User Interface for Social Interactions for the Elderly: A Review of Literature

“…Most of the authors and coauthors of the papers worked within the technology field, while a few worked in art and design. Regarding methodology for design and development of the prototypes, six papers [43][44][45][46][47][48] adopted a user-centered approach which involves users in the iterative process of requirement gathering, design, development, and testing. Although other papers did not use user-centered approach, some of them did involve users to identify their requirements.…”

“…Although the TUI was introduced by Ishii and Ullmer [18] nearly 20 years ago, our review only managed to identify 21 relevant papers using TUI to improve the social interactions of the older adults. Three out of 21 papers [44,46,47] were on same project, kommTui. Thus the number of individual studies was even smaller.…”

“…Only seven papers focused on the social interaction of the elderly people. Foverskov and Binder [43] studied the possibilities for elderly people to have more active interactions and dialogues; workshop series conducted by Ehrenstrasser and Spreicer [47] in 2010 explored on the communication habits of elderly people; Meza-Kubo et al [56] studied interactions of elderly people within cognitive stimulation sessions and the factors affecting the relationships of them with their family through case study; Huldtgren et al [58] observed the interactions of the elderly participants with a tangible multimedia book and interactions between people during reminiscence sessions; Marques et al [53] conducted usability testing to observe how elderly people used tangible objects and interacted with other players while playing tabletop game; using tangible objects and tabletop surface, Murko and Kunze [62] studied the well-being of the dementia patients in terms of social interactions between caregivers and patients; and lastly, Angelini et al [63] evaluated whether elderly participants managed communicate with the person on the other side of the prototype, a tangible window. The small amount of reviewed papers focusing on social interaction of the elderly people clearly shows the lack of evidence in using TUI to make an impact on the social interactions of older adults.…”

“…Nevertheless, six out of 21 papers [43][44][45][46][47][48] used a usercentered approach. These studies showed that involving the elderly users at an early stage, such as gathering input, could determine more specific and precise user requirements while designing the prototype.…”

“…Another finding is that West et al [45] and Ehrenstrasser and Spreicer [47] utilised cultural probes to provoke inspiring responses from the elderly participants; they came out with a design that suited the end users. Cultural probes can result in a design process which is more responsive, and they are suitable to be used when target users are unfamiliar [67].…”