Actively engaging older adults in the development and evaluation of tablet technology

Abstract

Author Keywords ACM Classification Keywords theory and methods, usercentred design OLDER ADULTS AND TECHNOLOGYactively engage OZCHI'12

Older adults as digital content producers

“…Aged care providers that offer community-based care help to make this possible. Given the central role the care organization played in our participants' lives, involving care managers in the study helped ensure participants felt comfortable contributing to the project and using Enmesh [31]. Future work is needed to explore how similar technologies could be used when face-to-face contact is not possible, or when care providers are unable to actively contribute.…”

“…A second social event was held after six weeks and a third at the end of the trial. These gatherings gave participants the opportunity to build rapport through face-to-face contact, and also helped to build participants' confidence and engage them in the research and evaluation process [31].…”

Engaging older adults in activity group settings playing games on touch tablets

“…It is proposed that feelings, interests and independence of older people have been neglected in technology design (e.g. Waycott et al, 2012). Their individual needs and interests need to be understood in order to create technologies that can be integrated in their lives.…”

Methods for Supporting Older Users in Communicating Their Emotions at Different Phases of a Living Lab Project

“…The participants use probes to provide some insight, at their discretion, about their daily lives. Often, challenges and opportunities are only discovered when the technologies are used and evaluated with users in real-world settings (Doyle et al, 2010;Waycott et al, 2012). Personal information and story generation are two important benefits that we see here in the use of probes as artefacts contributing to users' point of view.…”

“…A process of mutual learning for both designers and users can inform all participants' capacities to envisage future technologies and the practices in which they can be embedded" (Robertson & Simonsen, 2012). However, recent literature has recognized the challenge of actively engaging older adults in design processes and have come up with methods to do this (Edlin-White et al, 2012;Lindsay et al, 2012;Vines et al, 2012;Waycott et al, 2012;Waycott et al, 2013). What we contribute here is a means to specifically integrate emotions in a co-creative living lab process.…”