Elderly Vloggers: Authoring and Sharing Stories with Mobile Media and DTV Using the the GhostWriter Service

Storytelling, an activity intrinsic to groups of individuals, has always been of utmost importance to the evolution of humanity. In communities, it is common for experienced elderly to engage in such activity. Today, many technologies enable the production and sharing of content in general, and narrative in particular. However, older people are amongst those who, due to physical, cognitive, or cultural limitations, face problems with technologies such as authoring applications and content servers. Aiming to investigate alternatives to enable elderly to produce and sharing narratives in the form of short video stories, we propose GhostWriter. This is as a service, provided via an Android application, that supports video story authoring by (i) guiding users in selecting and annotating photos, (2) generating a corresponding YouTube video, and (3) sending the corresponding link to the user. Annotations may be in the form of text, audio and musical background. Users may to share their narratives, for example via YouTube sharing options. The application also enables the sharing of stories to small audiences directly on TV, using facilities offered by the middleware Ginga Profile-D. A group of elderly with basic smartphone experience was invited to use the application to create stories based on on predefined scripts. During the workshop, all users succeeded in using the application to create, access, and share their video stories.