Effects of input techniques and personal characteristics on smartphone interaction for elderly users

Abstract

Even though mobile technologies can provide many benefits such as a higher level of independence and well-being to older adults, many older people have difficulty using smartphones with touch screens due to age-related declines in the physical and cognitive functions, and lack of experience with the mobile technologies. Therefore, it is important to identify the characteristics of the elderly, understand the barriers for their smartphone usage and propose supporting tools or design guidelines to overcome the barriers and help older people interact with the smartphone easily.

The main purpose of this study was to understand the difficulties of the elderly using the smartphone, investigate the effects of input techniques (finger vs. stylus pen) and personal characteristics on smartphone interaction for elderly users. To achieve this objective, one survey and two follow-up experiments were conducted. At first, a survey on smartphone usage and barriers among the elderly was designed and conducted with 82 Korean older adults. Results showed that 62% of elderly participants were using smartphones, which suggests that smartphones have become a vital part of most elderly people’s daily lives. Elderly users can utilize necessary functions acceptably well and there is an increasing trend in the number of elderly smartphone users. Among smartphone functions, calling, texting, and searching were the three most frequently used functions. However, elderly smartphone users had difficulties using the keyboards and touch screens of smartphones, and some of them even tried using a smartphone but then changed back to a feature phone due to those difficulties. Based on the findings from our survey and considering the majority of the elderly were familiar with utilizing handwriting tools, the stylus pen was proposed as a potential solution for elderly smartphone users to aid typing and interacting with the touchscreen in general.

A follow-up experiment was conducted to investigate the differences in input techniques (finger vs. stylus pen) and age (young vs. old) on the task performance of smartphone users, in order to provide evidence as to which input technique should be used for elderly smartphone users. In this experiment, two groups of participants (young and old) used the finger and stylus pen to perform the most commonly used functions (calling, texting, and searching). The task performance (completion time, error rate), subjective rating for input techniques, and eye movement data were measured for comparison purpose. Young participants were acted as a control group to check the age-group difference. The experimental results showed that compared with the use of finger, the stylus pen can significantly improve the elderly’s task performance. In addition, even though the old group had significantly poorer performances for most of tasks than the young group, the use of the stylus pen can reduce the performance gaps between the two age groups.

The final experimental study was aimed to investigate what kind of personal characteristics (physical, cognitive abilities, and smartphone experience) could influence the task performance of elderly smartphone users, and to examine the association relationship between the personal characteristics and task performance. Results showed that the elderly’s cognitive ability, especially perceptual speed was highly related to their task performances.

To summarize, this research provided some evidences on the necessity of smartphone for elderly users and the use of stylus pen to fulfill elderly people’ smartphone use. In addition, this study also demonstrated the importance of considering the difference between young and old people, and the personal characteristics of the elderly in designing more elderly-friendly smartphones in the future.