Psychosocial Heuristic Factors of an Interactive Mobile Device for Geriatric Persons

Abstract

Over the years, the older person population has grown, currently at 9% of the world’s total population. This growth is attributed to modern treatment advancements, modern technology, and improved living standards. However, the Kenyan 2019 census shows that 1.7% and 2.2% of its population represent male and female elderly (Kenya National Bureau of Statistics, 2019), respectively, a growing concern of their physical, social, psychological, and psychosocial well-being. Therefore, the older population needs are continuously growing and necessitate a better solution to ensure their comfort, sense of belonging and elevate self-worth. Over the years, the physical, social and cognitive needs have been enabled by modern interactive mobile technologies commonly referred to as gerontechnology; to assist the elderly in their day-to-day activities, monitoring, exergames, social engagements, etc., encouraging active ageing. However, the interactive mobile interfaces are developed and evaluated technically, neglecting the users’ emotional experience in determining the older adults' acceptance and adoption of modern technologies. Moreover, the technical assessments are domiciled in the traditional heuristics such as Nielsen’s principles, Norman’s heuristics, and Schneiderman’s golden rules that have been followed over the years in universal design and not modified to the growing needs of users and evolving technologies. The inclusive design calls for revision as geriatric persons have unique needs to be considered during design and development. The inclusive design creates a moment with the users, offering a natural interaction that changes how one feels about the system/application/product. Through observations and interviews, this research purposed to investigate the unique needs of geriatric persons and assess if modern technologies incorporate these needs. The researcher achieved this through a design for delight (D4D) methodology that involved eight participants; four were community dwellers, and four were residents of a philanthropic social home. We introduced touch technology; used tablets for ten weeks where games and interactive video and voice calls through a cross-platform experiment. The researchers uniquely identified the participants’ psychosocial features and users’ emotions for modern technology usage. Perceived self-worth and subjective norm were the psychosocial factors that directly and indirectly affect the geriatric person’s usage behaviour towards technology usage, contributing to Chen and Chan’s STAM model (2014). The researcher considered the Psychosocial needs identified in this research for heuristic development to evaluate interactive mobile interfaces. Alrazgan et al. (2014) and Van Biljon et al. (2010) findings of look and feel, interaction, and functionality (as technical evaluation) vi were compared to our results and brought out unique features that these scholars did not elaborate on. This research also brought forth the psychosocial theme of generating psychosocial usability heuristics, which were defensible using the technical features for evaluation, affecting the behavioural attitude that determines usage. This research presents the heuristics guidelines that guide synchronous and non-synchronous activities such as mentorship and storytelling in an interactive mobile interface. The actions influenced the geriatric person's self-worth and sense of belonging as they believe they are a positive contributor to the surrounding societies through modern technology. For further works, the research recommends inclusion on mixed-age related issues to test the applicability of the proposed research model in determining user behaviour towards modern technology Keywords: Geriatric persons, Gerontechnology, Interactive Mobile Interfaces, Perceived Self-Worth, Psychosocial Usability Heuristics, and Subjective Norm,