Lowering elderly Japanese users? resistance towards computers by using touchscreen technology

Abstract

The standard qwerty keyboard is considered to be a major source of reluctance towards computer technology use by Japanese elderly, due to their limited experience with typewriters and the high cognitive demand involved in inputting Japanese characters. The touchscreen enables users to enter Japanese characters more directly and is expected to moderate this resistance. An e-mail terminal with a touchscreen was developed and compared with the same terminal using a standard keyboard and mouse. Computer attitudes and subjective evaluations of 32 older adults were measured. The results showed that the anxiety factor of computer attitudes declined significantly in the touchscreen condition.

Intuitive Learnability of Touch Gestures for Technology-Naive Older Adults

“…Older users can also use touchbased products successfully, regardless of their age-related functional deficiencies (Häikiö et al, 2007). According to Umemuro (2004) even the influence of the anxiety factor declined significantly in a study of older people's performance in a touch-screen environment.…”

Effectiveness of annotating by hand for non-alphabetical languages

“…Computers reputedly must handle over six thousand characters to process the Japanese language, which is a number that makes handling Japanese characters challenging [9,10,11]. There are four major methods for inputting Japanese: Roman character input with a QWERTY keyboard, kana (Japanese phonetic characters) character input with a Japanese Industrial Standards (JIS) keyboard, an M-type keyboard, and a thumb-shift keyboard [12,13].…”

Drag-and-drop for older adults using touchscreen devices

“…Touchscreen interaction has been recommended for older adults for several reasons: devices are less intimidating [18], direct interaction on the display requires less cognitive, spatial or attentional demand [21] so older users performances are better than compared with others input devices [2] Touchscree also reduces the age-related differences of interaction when compared to traditional input devices [3,4,16].…”