ELMO
Elderly people in the mobile age
This project focuses on elderly people and their use of devices with small interfaces, for example mobile phones. How elderly people can handle these devices and how they can navigate through an information space that are presented at a limited surface. Further how information should be structured and presented so that a device with a small interface will be easy to use for elderly people. In this project we also examine what kind of mobile services an elderly group of users will be requesting.
In earlier research several aspects have been shown concerning elderly peoples’ problems with using computers and Internet. There are for example age differences in navigation and elderly people may need more or different overview support than younger people. An important issue in this project is whether navigation problems with small interfaces are the same as with larger interfaces, or does small interfaces demand a new way of treating navigation problems for elderly users?
Mobile devices have small buttons and can be hard to use for elderly people because of the age-related decline in motor skills and in motor speed. Vision impairments are also common among elderly people and they also have problems with reading small text in displays and interfaces. Small interfaces further limit the possibility to provide overview support of the information space and also demands more complex structures of menus. In this project we study whether this limited area for overview information make the use of small devices difficult for elderly people, and how this group of users handle the complex menu structures within these interfaces. Participants in our studies are also interviewed about use and relevance concerning different mobile services.
Funding and partners
This project is in collaboration with Telia Research AB, where SICS contribute with knowledge on elderly people and their use of information technology in general and with small mobile devices in particular. We are also contributing with knowledge on this group’s presuppositions to use small interfaces.
Marie Sjölinder, marie@sics.se