Article

Share&Care: A Family Interaction Application for Seniors

Loneliness is a common problem that many older adults experience when they are living alone. Family interaction through telecommunication using mobile applications brings many technical challenges to older adults due to their lack of technological familiarity: many mobile applications are not designed to be senior-friendly. In our work, a user study was conducted on older adults' family interaction and their mobile phone usage through in-person interviews with 12 older adults and an online survey for 28 young people age from 16 to 35. By analyzing the survey results, we propose a senior-friendly communication application, Share&Care, which aims to reduce older adults' loneliness by promoting real-life family interaction and improving their experience with the mobile communication application between them and their family members. The solution integrates senior-friendly user interfaces such as voice navigation, remote family management, and multi-layer security to increase the older adults' comfortability and trust in our application. Interested readers can watch a YouTube video introducing the Share&Care app at  https://youtu.be/KeDxeV-5_Rk.

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