Elderly Friendliness Evaluation of Mobile Assistants

The rapidly increasing elderly population in many developed and developing countries poses great challenges to elderly care systems. To alleviate the problem of a shrinking workforce to deliver elderly care, using mobile intelligent assistants to lessen the caregivers' workload becomes a promising solution. However, the friendliness of such mobile assistants, which is seldom measured in a quantitative manner, may hinder their acceptance by the elderly users. In this paper, we propose a formalized systematic approach named Elderly Friendliness Evaluation Methodology (EFEM) to measure the elderly friendliness of any product, service or system. Furthermore, we apply EFEM to evaluate the elderly friendliness of five commercial mobile assistants and three prototypes. The comparison results show that the commercial assistants are less elderly-friendly than the prototypes. The high Elderly Friendliness Scores (EFSs) achieved by the prototypes suggest that they are highly likely to be well accepted by elderly users.