An HCI Survey on Elderly Users in India

Human–computer interaction (HCI) is about knowing the user, which becomes more important when we consider users with different capabilities in a developing country. This paper reports a survey to estimate Indian elderly and disabled users’ perceptual, cognitive and motor capabilities and also their experience and attitude towards technology. We initially identified functional parameters (Biswas and Langdon 2012; Biswas and Robinson 2013) that can affect users’ interaction with electronic devices and combined both objective metrics on functional parameters and subjective attitudes towards technology. Previous surveys either concentrated on ergonomics or demographic details of users in European countries (Langdon and Thimbleby 2010) or focused on a particular device like digital TV or mobile phones (ITU 2011; Narasimhan and Leblois 2012). There is not much reported work on the capabilities and attitude towards technology of the older Indian population, especially from a HCI point of view.

[1]  Daniel B Herren,et al.  Prediction of grip and key pinch strength in 978 healthy subjects , 2010, BMC musculoskeletal disorders.

[2]  Adjutant General's Office,et al.  Army Individual Test Battery , 2014 .

[3]  Michael Marmot,et al.  Health inequalities and the psychosocial environment-two scientific challenges. , 2004, Social science & medicine.

[4]  C Borrell,et al.  Socioeconomic differences in the prevalence of common chronic diseases: an overview of eight European countries. , 2005, International journal of epidemiology.

[5]  Johan P Mackenbach,et al.  Socioeconomic inequalities in morbidity and mortality in western Europe , 1997, The Lancet.

[6]  Patrick Langdon,et al.  Developing Multimodal Adaptation Algorithm for Mobility Impaired Users by Evaluating Their Hand Strength , 2012, Int. J. Hum. Comput. Interact..

[7]  Patrick Langdon,et al.  Inclusion and interaction: Designing interaction for inclusive populations , 2010, Interact. Comput..

[8]  Subhagata Chattopadhyay,et al.  Interaction techniques for users with severe motor impairment , 2013 .

[9]  Peter Robinson,et al.  Designing Inclusive Interfaces Through User Modeling and Simulation , 2012, Int. J. Hum. Comput. Interact..

[10]  Patrick Langdon,et al.  A Multimodal End-2-End Approach to Accessible Computing , 2015, Human–Computer Interaction Series.

[11]  Patrick Langdon,et al.  A Survey on Technology Exposure and Range of Abilities of Elderly and Disabled Users in India , 2013, HCI.