Accepted for/Published in: JMIR mHealth and uHealth
Date Submitted: May 18, 2020
Date Accepted: Oct 15, 2020
Warning: This is an author submission that is not peer-reviewed or edited. Preprints - unless they show as "accepted" - should not be relied on to guide clinical practice or health-related behavior and should not be reported in news media as established information.
Exploring Older Adults’ Perspective and Use of Smart Speaker-based Voice Assistants
ABSTRACT
Background:
Smart speaker-based voice assistants promise support for the aging population with the advantages of a voice-based interaction modality to handle requests. However, little is known about its usability, user experience, and usefulness from the perspectives of older adults.
Objective:
This paper aims to understand how older adults perceive and respond to voice assistants when they first interact with it in order to better support the aging population with this emerging technology. The ultimate goal of this work is to provide insights into the design of a voice assistant that improve its usability and usefulness for older adults and more effectively meet their needs for quality of later life.
Methods:
We conducted semi-structured interviews with 18 people aged 74 years old and above who have never used a smart speaker before. Using thematic analysis, we analyzed the interview data to reveal patterns across data sets, through open coding, axial coding, and selective coding.
Results:
While the overall first response to a voice assistant among our participants was positive, they experienced a number of usability issues, such as difficulty in constructing a structured sentence and misperceptions about how a voice assistant operates, as they continued interacting with it. In addition, we identified prevalent usage patterns and perspectives that older adults would have when using a voice assistant.
Conclusions:
Based on these findings, we suggest key design strategies to better leverage voice assistants to support the aging population, including helping older adults better understand how a voice assistant works, incorporating mistakes and common interaction patterns that older adults have into its design, and providing features tailored to the needs of older adults. We believe our findings and suggested design strategies will be useful for both researchers practitioners to help better leverage the capabilities of voice assistants for the aging population.
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Copyright
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