Efficiency of a Video and a Tutorial in Teaching Older Adults to Interact with Smartphones

While smartphones and tablets increasingly offer the possibility to act as healthcare devices, older adults, who may benefit from these new technologies, might be left behind due to technological illiteracy and lack of proper instructions. This study documents an experiment to evaluate and compare different instructional methods to teach older adults to perform a task on a smartphone. Although we did find that older adults were able to learn, no significant differences between instructional methods were found, and retention period is not known. The qualitative analysis suggests some influence of the users' initial perception of task difficulty over task performance.