Document type
Academic documents
Document subtype
PhD thesis
, PhD thesis
Title
Designing multimodal TV-based social network services for older adults
Participants in the publication
José/Coelho (Author)
Dep. Informática
LASIGE
Summary
World population is ageing with social isolation increasing as a result. While Social Network Services (SNS) like Facebook constitute the ideal vehicle for increasing social interactions, only about one third of this population makes use of them. Reasons for this lack of uptake are related to design complexity, privacy issues and age-related impairments, with traditional technology like the PC also proving to be insufficient for mediating older adults access to these services. This thesis argues for the development of SNS solutions based on Television (TV) and multimodal mechanisms, as TV is not only older adults’ most frequently used technology, but also perceived as less intimidating and associated with social interchanges, and as resorting to several modalities can help accommodating differences and to overcome disabilities typically present in this population. With this in mind, we drew recommendations for the design of TV-based applications targeting older adults by performing inquiring techniques and testing distinct TV-based multimodal prototypes. We followed this with a full literature survey on older adults’ use of social applications as well as several other inquiries regarding SNS and receptiveness of TV for social tasks. As a result, we formulated recommendations targeting the appropriate design of an inclusive SNS which span thirteen distinct domains. Recommendations focus mainly but not only on family, privacy, multimodality and UI design. Building on these and focusing on user-centered design (UCD) and participatory design we implemented a multimodal SNS and TV based prototype (You, Me & TV) and evaluated it during a period of 3 to 6 weeks with 3 participants. Results clearly indicate a potential for the system to increase online and offline interactions for older adults, the relevancy of TV in mediating this access for non-adopters of Facebook, the importance of remote controller to be kept as the primary way of interaction, how speech and gestures can help in content production and visualization purposes and how photos also play a relevant role.
Institution
UNIVERSIDADE DE LISBOA
Publication Identifiers