What about technology for elderly?

Written by Joonas

What do we all have in common? We are all aging… Technology isn’t only used by people in their 20s or 30s. The population (in Finland) is getting older and older [1]. We shouldn’t exclude the elderly from the use of technology. After all, most of us are considered as elderly people at some point.

When we think about the elderly, the first thing that comes to mind is the decrease of the senses of vision and hearing. Also, the decrease of the working memory capacity and motor skills. All of these put the elderly in disadvantage against the younger generation. Loss in near vision can be corrected with glasses, but reduced field of vision, decline in contrast and colour sensitivity and motor skills cannot be corrected as easily. Fortunately, this can be made easier for the user with proper design guidelines. Technology should be accessible to everyone, no matter the age or abilities of the user. This can be achieved by devices designed specifically for elderly, or by designing the content with accessibility[2] in mind.

The elderly require usually assistance (and persuasion) in taking technology into use. More often than I can remember, I have said that “You should try to do it first by yourself. You cannot learn to do it, if you don’t try” while simultaneously trying to teach how to do the task. Usually they haven’t even tried to do it by themselves before asking me to do it for them. Often, they succeed with the task with minimum help from me. Maybe they just wanted someone to oversee the whole situation, so they would feel comfortable with the technology.

If the technology product is branded for “the elderly” or as “assisted living aid”, it might make it hard for the user (in this case, an elderly person) to accept using it. They don’t generally want to be seen as someone who can’t take care of themselves. Even if the device is technologically advanced and full of features, it might still be considered as an elderly product and left to be. I think this is nowadays the biggest challenge when designing technology for elderly. After a while, the situation could be entirely different because the next generation has already used all kinds of devices for a long time.

References:

TIE-40106 Psychology of Pervasive Computing Lecture 12 – 19.11.2018

[1] https://www.tilastokeskus.fi/tup/suoluk/suoluk_vaesto_en.html

[2] https://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG21/

Social robot, could it adapt to every situation?

Written by Antero Mäkinen  

Could there be a social robot, which fits for all humans? All-in-one robot? I don’t think so, or at least it should have some transformer’s skills to adapt to every situation. Human’s gender, age and senses matter very much when concerning how social robot fits for every individual human. Some people don’t see, some people are deaf, some are young, and some are old and so on. I watched a couple of videos from YouTube to think about how user group matters when designing robots. A video called “The next frontier in robotics: social, collaborative robots | Andrea Thomaz | TEDxPeachtree” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O1ZhWv84eWE) explained it quite well with great examples.

In this video, Roboticist Andrea Thomaz had her robot buddy with her and she showed couple of examples with the robot. Even though the video is almost three years old, I think it’s still valid. I was really surprised when her robot started to talk, and it sounded like a little kid even though in my mind it didn’t look a kid, more like a monkey, so maybe it should have sounded a bit monkey-ish.

So, the first thing I would consider when thinking about designing a robot is that how it should visually look and what kind of voice should it have to match the visuals. For example, maybe for kids or elder people it wouldn’t be so weird if the robot talked like a little kid, but for middle-aged people it probably wouldn’t be so good choice if they wanted to take the robot seriously. Of course, there are always exceptions and good thing is that robots can have multiple voices in the same package.

Second thing that needs to be considered when designing to different age groups are gestures. Gestures are quite common in human-human interaction and in the video example, the robot acted very inhuman when she did actions without showing her eye and/or hand and body movement. This would definitely scare youngest and oldest users who would interact with the robot, because it would act so differently compared to humans and thus it wouldn’t be so easily approachable. In industrial robots, which actually doesn’t even try to look like humans, these things aren’t so important, but with social robots they truly are.

Last thing I would like to point out is the need of human-kind of interaction. It includes everything: visuals, gestures, sounds and even behavior. I think social robots should show empathy for all target users, but especially for kids and elders or those with special needs. First level of being empathic would be just to say correct things at correct times, but I think we’re still quite far from empathically skilled robots. Besides words, robots could also show emotions via gestures, for example by showing their support to grief they could give hugs or simply touch user’s shoulder, like we humans do.

To summarize, there are quite many things that need to be considered when designing social robots. Creating fits for all social robot that would have perfect visual, audio and behavior experience to every user will be hard, but I’m looking forward what the future brings on this area. Will social robots adapt perfectly to every user and how would they adapt in a group situation with multiple humans and robots?