Older adults are often portrayed as passive social media users who consume content rather than actively posting content. However, this binary divide between active and passive social media use overlooks nuanced kinds of engagement online. Via an eye-tracking study of older adults' Facebook use, this work shows how not clicking or commenting on content can involve engaged kinds of social media use even if they are not visible to other users or to the platform. Older adults' decisions to not actively click or comment on social media content---an act which is often associated with non-engagement---can be intentional and relational acts of caregiving. We draw from feminist care theories to draw parallels between the invisibility of care work that older adults do on social media and the invisibility often rendered in their offline lives. We discuss theoretical, methodological, and design implications for supporting older adults as engaged participants in relational and intentional care work.
https://doi.org/10.1145/3449197
Stairlifts are a widely-used technology in the home that help people with mobility issues to go up and down stairs. However, it is unclear how stairlifts are experienced by all household members and what this understanding implies for home healthcare technologies. We investigated the impact of stairlift installations on older adults' households through a qualitative study investigating the lived experience of the adoption and acceptance of this technology. Interviews and focus groups with primary users, household residents and service providers showed how the wider household identify misalignments between simplified stairlift installation models from service providers and describe a more complex, nuanced emotional journey which involves decision making, conflict and trauma and catharsis and independence. Findings provide transferrable outcomes for the smart home domain by highlighting the multi-resident home, the emotional intrusiveness of home healthcare technologies and the diversity that comes with providing care, unique to every household.
Co-design methods have involved older adults in the design process to fill the knowledge gap that younger adult designers might encounter when designing for an aging population. A focus of co-design means establishing equal and equitable relationships be-tween users and designers. To understand the factors that contribute to equal collaborations between older adults and student de-signers, we conducted 12 co-design sessions with 16 older adults and 11 student designers. We examined their interactions by adapt-ing a framework initially aimed to understand the child-adult design partnership. We also analyzed student designers' reflections to understand their experiences and learnings from designing with older adults. Our findings demonstrate that developing a design partnership is complex. The framework helped surface factors like sharing life experiences and role ownership that influenced bal-anced or unbalanced interactions. Through the student designers' reflections, we found that student designers identified challenges they encountered and the assumptions they had about the older adult population. We believe that immersing students in a co-design experience with older adults and leveraging reflection activities provides an educational and meaningful experience to the design students.
https://doi.org/10.1145/3479506
Built-in pervasive cameras have become an integral part of mobile/wearable devices and enabled a wide range of ubiquitous applications with their ability to be ``always-on’’. In particular, life-logging has been identified as a means to enhance the quality of life of older adults by allowing them to reminisce about their own life experiences. However, the sensitive images captured by the cameras threaten individuals' right to have private social lives and raise concerns of privacy and security in the physical world. This threat gets worse when image recognition technologies can link images to people, scenes, and objects, hence, implicitly and unexpectedly reveal more sensitive information such as social connections. In this paper, we first examine life-log images obtained from 54 older adults to extract (a) the artifacts or visual cues, and (b) the context of the image that influences an older life-logger's ability to recall the life events associated with a life-log image. We call these artifacts and contextual cues ``stimuli''. Using the set of stimuli extracted, we then propose a set of obfuscation strategies that naturally balances the trade-off between reminiscability and privacy (revealing social ties) while selectively obfuscating parts of the images. More specifically, our platform yields privacy-utility tradeoff by compromising, on average, modest 13.4% reminiscability scores while significantly improving privacy guarantees -- around 40% error in cloud estimation.
https://doi.org/10.1145/3476047
Older adults are especially vulnerable to online cybersecurity and privacy (SP) threats, such as phishing, ransomware, and targeted misinformation campaigns. Prior work has suggested that this vulnerability may be addressed with the design of social SP interfaces, such that groups of individuals might work together on behalf of one another to manage SP threats collectively. To this end, we present findings from a qualitative inquiry conducted with older adults and members of technology-rich middle-income households in urban India, where technology users have been shown to engage in relatively more social SP practices. Our research examines the collaborative behaviors enacted by different members of the household for protection from SP threats. In particular, we show how self-appointed family technology managers straddle the line between stewardship and paternalism in their efforts to protect older adults' from perceived digital threats. We also offer design implications for supporting collaborative cybersecurity within households based on the insights derived from our analysis.
https://doi.org/10.1145/3449212
The COVID-19 pandemic led to dire consequences globally, and it has been particularly challenging for older adults. They are at a higher risk of adverse outcomes of the disease. Older adults also use less technology than other age groups, so they mostly rely on in-person interactions and services for social support. However, disease mitigation efforts such as social distancing and self-quarantining severely limited in-person interactions, hindering older adults’ social support during the COVID-19 crisis. In this paper, we present findings on social support realities from semi-structured interviews with older adults (N=15) living alone in community dwellings. We found that older adults’ support roles, support sources, and support concerns evolve as they passed through this time of sweeping change. They are enthusiastic about providing support to people who are older and more vulnerable than themselves. At the same time, their needs for safety, autonomy, and independence create tensions around social support. We propose a framework to illustrate the evolving ecology of social support that can facilitate the holistic design of socio-technical support systems for older adults. We argue against the societal portrayal of older adults as vulnerable individuals. Rather, there is an opportunity to design support systems considering them as anchors in society. Towards that goal, we present design implications for future socio-technical support systems to empower older adults to age in place during a crisis.
https://doi.org/10.1145/3479607
Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, older adults have been encouraged to stay indoors and isolated, leading to potential disruptions in their social activities and interpersonal relationships. This interview study (N=24) provides a close examination of older adults' technology adoption and communication practices in light of the pandemic. Our interviews revealed that the pandemic motivated many older adults to learn new technology and become more tech-savvy in an effort to stay connected with others. However, older adults also reported challenges related to the pandemic that were major impediments to technology adoption. These were: (1) lack of access to in-person technology support under physical distancing mandates, (2) lack of opportunities for online participation due to negative age stereotypes and assumptions, and (3) increased apprehension to seek help from family members and friends who were suffering from pandemic-related stresses. This study extends technology adoption literature and contributes an up-to-date examination of the "grey digital divide" (the gap between older adults who use technology and those who do not). Our findings demonstrate that despite the rapidly increasing number of tech-savvy seniors, a digital divide not only persists, but has been exacerbated by the transition to virtual-only offerings. We reveal the challenges and coping strategies of non-users and propose actionable solutions to increase digital access for older adults during the COVID-19 pandemic and beyond.