User experience of conversational user interface for social care of the elderly

Abstract

In the context of an increase in the number and needs of the elderly, the field of social care is under rising demands. New technological solutions are sought to provide an answer to the challenges of elderly care. Conversational user interfaces are an intuitive means of interaction, where the user xchanges information with a software system through natural language. Taking into account the specific needs of older adults, such as deteriorating eyesight and motor skills, as well as their varied levels of technical abilities, it appears that conversational user interfaces have the potential of facilitating the access of elderly to technology.

This thesis investigates the user experience of elderly with a conversational user interface through which they can gain access to social care. As relevant aspects of user experience, the research focuses on gathering information about thoughts, feelings, opinions and expectations. The methods employed include building a prototype of a conversation user interface for social care and running an interview and observation study with the target user group - elderly kin carers in Finland.

The results include an overview of the elderly kin carer life situation and technology needs, as well as the user experience with the protoytype. While the perception of a conversational user interface for social care varied among the interviewees, findings clearly show that the main use case is providing easy access to information from official and unofficial sources. Overall, completing the test task was simple and error recovery was quick. There was a certain distrust in the quality of personalized information and lengthy output was troublesome for some users. Further work could investigate user trust and output structure, as well as technology status and future trends of conversational user interfaces.