Exploring Traditional Phones as an E-Mail Interface for Older Adults

Mobile Phone Use by People with Mild to Moderate Dementia: Uncovering Challenges and Identifying Opportunities: Mobile Phone Use by People with Mild to Moderate Dementia

With the rising usage of mobile phones by people with mild dementia, and the documented barriers to technology use that exist for people with dementia, there is an open opportunity to study the specifics of mobile phone use by people with dementia. In this work we provide a first step towards filling this gap through an interview study with fourteen people with mild to moderate dementia. Our analysis yields insights into mobile phone use by people with mild to moderate dementia, challenges they experience with mobile phone use, and their ideas to address these challenges. Based on these findings, we discuss design opportunities to help achieve more accessible and supportive technology use for people with dementia. Our work opens up new opportunities for the design of systems focused on augmenting and enhancing the abilities of people with dementia.

An Empirical Study of Older Adult’s Voice Assistant Use for Health Information Seeking

Although voice assistants are increasingly being adopted by older adults, we lack empirical research on how they interact with these devices for health information seeking. Also, prior work shows how voice assistant responses can provide misleading or inaccurate information and be harmful particularly in health contexts. Because of increased health needs while aging, this paper studies older adult’s (ages 65+) health-related voice assistant interactions. Motivated by a lack of empirical evidence for how older adults approach information seeking with emerging technologies, we first conducted a survey of n = 201 older adults to understand how they engage voice assistants compared to a range of offline and digital sources for health information seeking. Findings show how voice assistants were used for confirmatory health queries, with users showing signs of distrust. As much prior work focuses on perceptions of voice assistant use, we conducted scenario-based interviews with n = 35 older adults to study health-related voice assistant behavior. In interviews, participants engaged with different health topics (flu, migraine, high blood pressure) and scenario types (symptom-driven, behavior-driven) using a voice assistant. Findings show how conversational and human-like expectations with voice assistants lead to information breakdowns between the older adult and voice assistant. This paper contributes a nuanced query-level analysis of older adults’ voice-based health information seeking behaviors. Further, data provide evidence for how query reformulation happens with complex topics in voice-based information seeking. We use our findings to discuss how voice interfaces can better support older adults’ health information seeking behaviors and expectations.

Managing Perceived Loneliness and Social-Isolation Levels for Older Adults: A Survey with Focus on Wearables-Based Solutions

As an inevitable process, the number of older adults is increasing in many countries worldwide. Two of the main problems that society is being confronted with more and more, in this respect, are the inter-related aspects of feelings of loneliness and social isolation among older adults. In particular, the ongoing COVID-19 crisis and its associated restrictions have exacerbated the loneliness and social-isolation problems. This paper is first and foremost a comprehensive survey of loneliness monitoring and management solutions, from the multidisciplinary perspective of technology, gerontology, socio-psychology, and urban built environment. In addition, our paper also investigates machine learning-based technological solutions with wearable-sensor data, suitable to measure, monitor, manage, and/or diminish the levels of loneliness and social isolation, when one also considers the constraints and characteristics coming from social science, gerontology, and architecture/urban built environments points of view. Compared to the existing state of the art, our work is unique from the cross-disciplinary point of view, because our authors' team combines the expertise from four distinct domains, i.e., gerontology, social psychology, architecture, and wireless technology in addressing the two inter-related problems of loneliness and social isolation in older adults. This work combines a cross-disciplinary survey of the literature in the four aforementioned domains with a proposed wearable-based technological solution, introduced first as a generic framework and, then, exemplified through a simple proof of concept with dummy data. As the main findings, we provide a comprehensive view on challenges and solutions in utilizing various technologies, particularly those carried by users, also known as wearables, to measure, manage, and/or diminish the social isolation and the perceived loneliness among older adults. In addition, we also summarize the identified solutions which can be used for measuring and monitoring various loneliness- and social isolation-related metrics, and we present and validate, through a simple proof-of-concept mechanism, an approach based on machine learning for predicting and estimating loneliness levels. Open research issues in this field are also discussed.

Log on and Prosper? Little Evidence for Codevelopment Between Psychological Adjustment and Technology Use in Older Adulthood

Objectives

Researchers have hypothesized that using Information and Communications Technology (ICT), such as e-mail and social media, may buffer older adults from normative age-graded declines in psychological adjustment. However, past intervention research has been unable to conclusively evaluate this proposition, and no studies to date have examined this topic using naturalistic large-scale longitudinal methods.

Method

In this preregistered study, we examined the codevelopment between three aspects of psychological adjustment (loneliness, satisfaction with life [SWL], and depressiveness) and three factor-analytically derived clusters of ICT use (instrumental, social, and media) using a longitudinal representative sample of 2,922 Dutch adults aged 65 and older that contributed data annually from 2012 to 2017.

Results

Latent growth curve analyses indicated that ICT use was largely unrelated to psychological adjustment, both cross-sectionally and longitudinally. Of 36 associations tested, three were significant, and only one remained significant after including health and demographic covariates. Specifically, higher levels of media ICT use at baseline predicted steeper declines in SWL across the study period. Furthermore, results of random-intercept cross-lagged analyses indicated that change in ICT use did not predict future change in psychological adjustment, and vice versa.

Discussion

Results of this study help clarify the mixed results of past intervention research, indicating that effects of ICT use on psychological adjustment tend to be either null or much smaller than can be detected using typical intervention sample sizes. Overall, these results suggest that the association between technology use and psychological adjustment is negligible in older adults.