Social isolation among older adults is a growing public health issue with serious consequences for individual and societal well-being.While strong social connections provide protective health benefts for healthy aging, social isolation continues to rise in the older adult population, emphasizing the need for innovative interventions to mitigate its detrimental health impacts.Although technological solutions can foster social engagement, the relationship between older adults and technology is complex, requiring adaptive and inclusive approaches that accommodate diverse needs rather than assuming universal benefts from digital tools.Through 14 semistructured interviews with adults aged 60-84 who self-reported social isolation risks, we examined factors infuencing their social participation and perceptions of technology for social connection.Our fndings reveal a complex interplay of barriers and opportunities for technology design and adoption.This paper contributes to the understanding of support needs among socially isolated older adults by ofering insights into their social experiences and technology attitudes, as well as design considerations for technologies that promote meaningful social connections.

Intelligent voice assistants (IVAs) have the potential to facilitate health information tasks among older adults and caregivers. However, when adopting these tools, older adults face a significant challenge balancing needs for support versus values, such as privacy and control. This paper explores older adults' expectations of IVAs that support collaborative health information tasks. We conducted semi-structured interviews with ten older adult-informal caregiver dyads and nine older adults who collaborate with formal caregivers to manage their health (n=29). To identify factors that influence supportive and non-supportive interactions in caregiving relationships, we use an existing model to examine collaborative care experiences within older adult-caregiver dynamics and perceptions of emerging IVAs that support similar activities. We learned that expectations of emerging IVA interactions overlap with those within human caregiving relationships. We discuss implications for designing IVAs for collaborative health information tasks that address needs for control, trust, transparency, and personability and the need to further explore designing for support versus care.

Continued social participation is a key determinant of healthy aging and lowers the risks of isolation and loneliness. While online technologies can provide a convenient way for older adults to connect socially, some prefer connecting offline with others in their community, which can pose different challenges, especially for those with disabilities. Yet, we still know little about how older adults with visual disabilities might leverage technology to address their needs for engaging in social events in their communities. We interviewed 16 blind or visually impaired (BVI) adults 60 years or older to understand their experiences engaging in community social activities and the role of technology in the process. We describe the challenges participants faced connecting with others in their community and their use of technology to overcome them. Based on our findings, we discuss design opportunities for technology to help BVI older adults manage the hidden labor social participation.

Voice assistants (VAs) such as Siri or Amazon Alexa can benefit older adults by offering accessible and convenient information options and aiding living independently. Therefore, researchers have considered how VAs might support older adults. Yet, few studies have explored opportunities for VAs to support communities and the implications of this integration. This study investigates older adults' perceptions of VAs and the potential to extend VA capabilities to support an independent living community. We invited independent living residents to virtual community forums and interviews to discuss their experiences with VAs, expectations, and concerns for VA integration to support information exchange, wellness, and social connections in their community. We found that residents desired additional VA capabilities to address unique community needs, including building on existing community capacities to support VA adoption and use. We discuss VA design implications for independent living communities and recommendations to support VA sustainability in a community environment.

Innovations in HCI research of health-related pervasive and ubiquitous technologies can potentially improve older adults’ access to healthcare resources and support long-term independence in the home. Despite efforts to include their voices in technology research and design, many older adults have yet to actualize these health benefits, with barriers of access and proficiency actually widening the gap of health inequities. We reviewed 174 HCI publications through a systematic review to examine who is engaged in the design of health technologies for older adults, methods used to engage them, and how different types of participation might impact design directions. Findings highlight that thus far, many identity dimensions have not been explored in HCI aging research. We identify research gaps and implications to promote expanding research engagement with these dimensions as a way to support the design of health technologies that see better adoption among marginalized populations.

A healthy diet and increased physical activity are essential for reducing the prevalence of cardiovascular disease and related deaths, a worldwide public health concern that disproportionately affects Black American communities. Still, Black Americans can face unique challenges meeting dietary and physical activity requirements due to inequities in access and quality of care, environmental and local factors, and difficulties in changing individual health behaviors. Personal informatics and self-tracking tools are one way of increasing awareness of health behaviors to motivate behavior change. However, there are still gaps in knowledge about what encourages different users to engage with personal informatics tools over time, particularly when used in collaborative, community-health settings. This paper contributes a nuanced understanding of fifteen participants' reasons for engaging in an existing community-based health education and behavior change program that combines collaborative self-tracking with culturally relevant content and social engagement to motivate heart-healthy behaviors. We illustrate participants' positive and negative experiences engaging in self-tracking and collaborative tasks during the program. We also discuss how participants envision that integrating technology might support or hinder participant engagement and the work of deploying community-based public health interventions. Finally, we discuss design implications for culturally informed, community-based personal informatics tools that engage Black American's in heart-healthy activities.

Texting relies on screen-centric prompts designed for sighted users, still posing significant barriers to people who are blind and visually impaired (BVI). Can we re-imagine texting untethered from a visual display? In an interview study, 20 BVI adults shared situations surrounding their texting practices, recurrent topics of conversations, and challenges. Informed by these insights, we introduce TextFlow , a mixed-initiative context-aware system that generates entirely auditory message options relevant to the users’ location, activity, and time of the day. Users can browse and select suggested aural messages using finger-taps supported by an off-the-shelf finger-worn device without having to hold or attend to a mobile screen. In an evaluative study, 10 BVI participants successfully interacted with TextFlow to browse and send messages in screen-free mode. The experiential response of the users shed light on the importance of bypassing the phone and accessing rapidly controllable messages at their fingertips while preserving privacy and accuracy with respect to speech or screen-based input. We discuss how non-visual access to proactive, contextual messaging can support the blind in a variety of daily scenarios.

Despite longstanding interests to understand user involvement in participatory, community-based research, we are still learning how including different users can influence the design process. In this paper, we share what we learned examining older adults' participation in formative studies conducted to redesign a resident-led, internal website at a Life Plan Community in a partnership with residents and staff. We administered questionnaires followed by focus groups and interviews to understand residents' experiences and concerns with the website; however, we found early in our process that several non-users participated advocating for changes outside the scope of our initial project goals. We reflect on how participation by different users, particularly non-users, helped us uncover design tensions related to underlying socio-technical concerns about the website. Our work builds on work promoting critical reflection in HCI. We extend work on participation, non-use, and advocacy in design and share practical examples of adapting our approach to prepare for design activities.

This paper presents our experiences supporting web accessibility planning among a group of older adult online content creators. We highlight challenges we encountered meeting the web accessibility informational needs of our partners and helping this group of creators become aware and put in place measures to address accessibility issues. Our reflections highlight opportunities for future efforts to improve web accessibility support for everyday content creators and support for helping those less familiar with web accessibility options.

Intelligent voice assistants (IVAs) have the potential to support older adults' independent living. However, despite a growing body of research focusing on IVA use, we know little about why older adults become IVA non-users. This paper examines the reasons older adults use, limit, and abandon IVAs (i.e., Amazon Echo) in their homes. We conducted eight focus groups, with 38 older adults residing in a Life Plan Community. Thirty-six participants owned an Echo for at least a year, and two were considering adoption. Over time, most participants became non-users due to their difficulty finding valuable uses, beliefs associated with ability and IVA use, or challenges with use in shared spaces. However, we also found that participants saw the potential for future IVA support. We contribute a better understanding of the reasons older adults do not engage with IVAs and how IVAs might better support aging and independent living in the future.

Individuals who experience temporary, intermittent, or gradual changes in pointing ability may encounter frustrating experiences when using computer input devices. Personalized pointing systems that automatically assess changes in performance and provide individualized information and assistance may benefit these users. However, there has been little inquiry into this populations' expectations for interacting with these types of systems. We describe a participatory design process in which we used a technology probe to assess the information needs and expectations of 27 individuals who experience occasional changes in pointing ability, through interactions with and discussion regarding a high-fidelity personalized pointing prototype. Participants preferred notification and adaptation interactions that provided them with control and explanation of system actions, instead of abstract notifications and automatic adaptations. We describe how we applied these finding in the design of the PINATA system.