User-Centred Approaches for Designing Assistive Technologies to Support Older Adults

As assistive technologies to support older adults become more prevalent, it becomes more critical to examine the role that older adults hold in the interaction with these technologies. For effective interactions with such assistive systems, there are several challenges that need to be resolved to achieve assured independence, confidence, ease of use, trust, acceptance, and motivation. The challenges include understanding and designing for autonomy, designing instructional support systems, user-centered decision-making systems, explainable intelligent systems that facilitate understanding and ease of use, just to mention a few. These challenges still constitute gaps that influence the willingness of the older adults to use these systems and widespread acceptance. This Research Topic welcomes research that takes a user-centered approach for designing assistive technologies ranging from mobile health applications, smart home devices, wearables to computer agents, robots and other autonomous systems, to truly meet the needs of the older adult users.

Understanding aging and the needs of older adults with respect to supporting their health, wellness and quality of life is vital to reliably design assistive technologies that support the older adults. This includes identifying the potential of assistive technologies as well as their limitations in meeting these needs. User-centered design approaches that address one or more of the aforementioned challenges while leveraging on the capabilities of the technologies to support health and wellness of the older adult are sought. In general, without proper design, the older adults may find it difficult to calibrate their trust in the system, thus influencing their willingness to adopt the continuous usage. As these systems become more intelligent and are capable of complex decision-making, it becomes increasingly important for the older adult users to understand these systems better through user-focused design techniques that foster usability of the technology. The goal would therefore be to research into methods and design techniques that prioritizes the older adult users in the design of new technological capabilities, task performance processes, data storage and security options, privacy protection options, personalization of such systems to make them more usable and useful for the older adults without overwhelming them.

Submissions for this Research Topic include, but are not limited to, areas such as:

• Development of user-focused instructional training, materials and/or guides
• Designing user-centered assistive technology interventions
• Designing user-centered decision-making applications
• Participatory design process in intelligent systems for older adults
• Understanding autonomy of intelligent systems
• Transparency levels applicable for older adult users
• Preserving privacy through co-active design
• Psychosocial aspects that influence the design and/or use of technologies for older adults
• Aging in place design for intelligent systems
• Domestic and socially assistive robots for older adults
• Robots in older adults’ healthcare
• Presciption-based games for older adults

All manuscript contributions submitted to this Research Topic must highlight or utilize user-centered/human factors approach for designing assistive technologies to support older adults.

Article types and fees

This Research Topic accepts the following article types, unless otherwise specified in the Research Topic description:

• Brief Research Report
• Case Report
• Clinical Trial
• Data Report
• Editorial
• FAIR² Data
• General Commentary
• Hypothesis and Theory
• Methods
• ... View all formats

Articles that are accepted for publication by our external editors following rigorous peer review incur a publishing fee charged to Authors, institutions, or funders.

Article types

This Research Topic accepts the following article types, unless otherwise specified in the Research Topic description:

• Brief Research Report
• Case Report
• Clinical Trial
• Data Report
• Editorial
• FAIR² Data
• General Commentary
• Hypothesis and Theory
• Methods
• Mini Review
• Opinion
• Original Research
• Perspective
• Review
• Systematic Review
• Technology and Code

Keywords: User-focused, Design for Aging, Intelligent Systems, Human factors, Gerontechnology

Important note: All contributions to this Research Topic must be within the scope of the section and journal to which they are submitted, as defined in their mission statements. Frontiers reserves the right to guide an out-of-scope manuscript to a more suitable section or journal at any stage of peer review.