Overview
Intelligent assistants (IAs) represent a potential solution to provide older adults with personalized health assistance at home, such as to reduce social isolation or find health information. However, to design useful and accepted IAs for health, it is important to understand older adults' perspectives and how they desire to integrate IAs into their homes.
Target Users
Elderly living by themselves
Technology
Intelligent Voice Assistants
(exploring new ways of interaction)
Guide
Aquesha Martin-Hammond
Other Researchers
Jamie Sanders
Siddhant Bhandari
Introduction
Voice-based Intelligent voice-assistants (IVAs) such as Amazon Alexa and Google Home offer potentially new ways for individuals to access information and resources in their homes. IVAs make use of conversational interactions that allow users to perform a range of tasks using their voice. IVA devices typically include capabilities that allow users a “smart home” experience and range in price and functionality. Most companies provide lower-cost entry level devices that could potentially widen the diversity of users of smart home devices at home.
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While, research on the uses of home-based IVAs is in its infancy, early studies suggest that these devices are being adopted by users for many reasons including home automation finding basic information, and entertainment. The use of IVAs has also been studied among different populations of users including older adults, people with disabilities, and youth and in different contexts such as in educational settings. These studies generally demonstrate that user find benefit in the use of IVAs as a way to interact with information, entertainment, and their home environment, however they also highlight quite a few open concerns. For aging IVAs open a host of opportunities for aging in place.
The use of intelligent voice assistants to support older adults as they age in place in growing. Some senior communities are actively deploying Amazon Echoes in the homes of their residents to reduce social isolation but are also exploring opportunities for IVAs to assist older adults with other health and wellness tasks. Current commercial IVAs provide some functionality for accessing health information, but a recent study suggests that these recommendations have flaws that are sometimes not noticed by users and there is a need to rethink IVAs for consumer health.
Therefore, despite growing interest in using intelligent voice assistants to assist older adults with health and wellness at home, there are still significant gaps in understanding about how older adults perceive IVAs for health, and the perceived opportunities and barriers of adopting and integrating an IVA for health and wellness in their homes. In this paper we address the question of; what do older adults perceive as opportunities and barriers of adopting an IVA for health at home? We were interested in understanding their thoughts on if and how an IVA might be useful for health in their homes as well as explore their concerns as potential consumers.
Intelligent Voice Assistant Prototype
We designed a prototype of an intelligent voice assistant that was based on current voice assistants on the market such as Alexa and Google home. We used a prototype for two reasons: 1) we wanted to explore scenarios not yet supported by commercial voice assistants and 2) we did not want to constrain our discussions to the current capabilities of commercial voice assistants. Therefore we instead conducted a WOZ study to simulate interactions with a voice assistant.
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Perceived Benefits and Barriers
of IVAs for Health and Wellness among older adults
BENEFITS:
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Affordable Assistance with Health Tasks
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Natural and Flexible Input Modalities
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Engaging Interactions
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BARRIERS:
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Limitations of Home Environment
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Privacy and Autonomy
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Trust in Information and Recommendations
IMPLICATIONS FOR THE FUTURE
Broadening Access to Smart Home Health Technology
Smart home technologies are seen as one opportunity for carrying out the vision of aging in place. As devices become smaller and more affordable, there is a wealth of opportunity to reach populations of users who may once have seen these technologies as expensive or complex. Therefore, our findings suggest there is an opportunity for future work in this area as well as an opportunity to broaden access to smart home technologies for health those that may see these devices as unaffordable or costly.​
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Transparent IVAs for Health and Wellness
​All participants raised concerns on how an IVA for health might secure their data or their personal health data being “hacked or leaked”.
As growth in more affordable devices that provide voice interactions become more commonplace it will become ever more important to identify ways to help users understand how systems are making decisions as well as how systems are collecting and managing data. Our work suggests that there is a need to understand how to provide better transparency in voice-only systems. Therefore, one potential future area to explore is how to provide better transparency in IVAs primarily those that do not include visual interfaces, particularly when the focus is on sensitive topics such as health. Currently, many commercial devices have not met the legal requirements to handle personal health data, however, some are exploring this option.
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Ethical Design of IVAs for Consumer Health
​It will also be important to understand how to design these systems in a way that can identify gaps in user understanding regarding the information and recommendations presented and instead of providing a solution connect consumers with people or physical resources that may be of better assistance.