"My Hand Doesn't Listen to Me!"

Abstract

Adoption and use of novel technology by the institutionalized 'oldest old' (80+) is understudied. This population is the fastest growing demographic group in developed countries, providing design opportunities and challenges for HCI. Since the recruitment of oldest old people is challenging, research tends to focus on older adults (65+) and their use of and attitudes towards existing communication technologies, or on their caregivers and social ties. Our study deployed a novel communication appliance among five frail oldest old people living in a long-term care facility, which included field observations and usability and accessibility tests. Our findings suggest factors that facilitate and hinder the adoption of communication technologies, such as social, attitudinal, digital literacy, physical, and usability. We also discuss issues that arise in studying technology adoption by the oldest old, including usability and accessibility testing, and suggest solutions that may be helpful to HCI researchers working with this population. Figure 1: The InTouch interface, showing the four message options: video, picture, audio and 'wave'. HCI for the Elderly CHI 2015, Crossings, Seoul, Korea RESEARCH QUESTIONSWe contribute to the aforementioned literature by examining how an understudied population (oldest old people living in an institutionalized setting) adopts and uses a novel communication technology. This study expands upon prior work [3], which included interviews about general communication patterns of older adults living in a variety of sites, two probes introducing early prototype communication appliances, and the use of a first version of InTouch by a female older adult living in a retirement residence.In this paper, we report on our new deployment of InTouch with five oldest old individuals living in a long-term care facility. This study is guided by the following research questions:RQ1 What facilitates the adoption of a communication appliance among institutionalized oldest old people? Figure 2: A participant using InTouch.HCI for the Elderly CHI 2015, Crossings, Seoul, Korea

Recursive approaches to technology adoption, families, and the life course: actor network theory and strong structuration theory

“…For six participants, those who had relatives living abroad or afar, their social connectedness -which is more than social interaction, it is meaningful social interactionincreased with InTouch. However, for two of our participants, the technology had the potential to make them more aware of their social isolation and loneliness as relatives and friends did not reply to their messages (Neves et al, 2015;Neves et al, 2017a;Neves et al, 2017b).…”

“…To test adoption and use of this app, as well as its potential to address issues of social isolation and loneliness, we conducted two-and three-month deployments of the technology in a long-term care facility and a multi-care retirement community in Toronto, Canada (Neves et al, 2015;Neves et al, 2017a;Neves et al, 2017b). These studies included 16 older adults (ages ranged from 74 to 95; M = 83.9; SD = 5.5; ten identified as female and six as male) and their study partners (relatives or friends).…”

Trade-offs in the design of multimodal interaction for older adults

“…Privacy and context of use. The context of use should be carefully considered when designing multimodal technology (Neves et al 2015;Brewster 2010a, 2010b):…”

“…This might be true for some combinations of multimodal channels. For example, it has been shown that older adults find some modalities or combination of modalities too complex to use when using multimodal applications (Neves et al 2015;Naumann, Wechsung, and Hurtienne 2010;Lepicard and Vigouroux 2012). On the other hand, designing interaction with simplicity in mind might force a compromise on functionality (Norman 2010), and this holds true also for multimodal interaction.…”

Designing Mobile Interactions for the Ageing Populations

“…As a result, even though smartphone ownership among older adults has significantly increased in recent years [2, 3,12], smartphone adoption level for is still low (e.g., smartphone ownership in the US is at 27% for older adults as of 2015, whereas 85% of young people aged 18-29 are smartphone owners [13]). Consequently, older adults may be losing the possible benefits and opportunities from this growing digital era [1,5,7].…”