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Ambient Awareness to Strengthen the Family Social Network of Older Adults

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Abstract

Social networking sites (SNSs) provide ambient awareness of the interests and activities of friends and relatives helping them sustain and strengthen their social ties. Older adults who are not adopting SNSs might however feel like outsiders within their own families who increasingly rely on these services to socialize. Previous research has shown that situated displays can provide appropriate interfaces for older adults to use digital services. In this paper we explore how situated displays can intuitively provide ambient awareness to strengthen the family social network of older adults. We designed and developed Tlatoque, a situated display, to seamlessly integrate older adults into the SNS used by their relatives. The results of a 21-week deployment study of an initial version of Tlatoque in one extended family showed that the older adult became more conscious of relatives’ activities, which also enriched in-person encounters. However, relatives expected the older adult to reply to their posts in the SNS and Tlatoque lacked mechanisms for the older adult to provide feedback. We re-designed Tlatoque to incorporate means for enabling the older adult to share information back to the SNS. We conducted a second 21-week deployment study with another extended family to evaluate the use of this new version of the system. Our results indicate that the second design was successful in providing ambient awareness to the older adult as well as to her relatives. We conclude that situated displays that provide SNS services can assist the integration of older adults to their social network and contribute to enhance asymmetric relations between the older adult and younger relatives.

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Notes

  1. Tlatoque [tlaʔ 'tokeʔ] a náhuatl word meaning “those who talk”—the plural of Tlatoani. *http://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tlatoani

  2. Personas are not real people, but they represent them throughout the design process. They are hypothetical archetypes of actual users. *Cooper, Alan (2004). The Inmates Are Running the Asylum. Indianapolis, USA: Sams Publishing

  3. The primary caregiver takes the older adult to her morning exercises, medical appointments or social events.

  4. For simplicity of reading, from now on, we will refer to this participant as G1: grandma 1

  5. For simplicity of reading, from now on, we will call this group of participants RSR: the representative sample of relatives

  6. We consider a family photograph as the one where there is at least one member of the family on it.

  7. We did not include P1 since the gained ambient awareness had no significant effect on the relationship.

  8. Actions or action links provide additional ways to interact with activities and streamed content. *Messina, Chris (2010). Actions, Activity streams, Web Page, March 2010. http://wiki.activitystrea.ms/w/page/23655855/Actions. Accessed 12 July 2010.

  9. A GUI widget is a visual building block interwoven in an application providing a single interaction point for the direct manipulation of a given kind of data. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GUI_widget

  10. For simplicity of reading, from now on, we will call to this participant G2: grandma 2

  11. FarmVille is a farming social network game. http://company.zynga.com/games/farmville

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Acknowledgments

This work was partially funded by CONACYT under contract CB-20080-105674 and trough a scholarship provided to the first author.

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  1. Department of Computer Science, CICESE, Ensenada, México

    Raymundo Cornejo, Mónica Tentori & Jesús Favela

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  1. Raymundo Cornejo
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Correspondence to Raymundo Cornejo.

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Cornejo, R., Tentori, M. & Favela, J. Ambient Awareness to Strengthen the Family Social Network of Older Adults. Comput Supported Coop Work 22, 309–344 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10606-012-9166-2

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