“Computer, how do smart speakers support aging in place?” – Smart speakers and images of ageing
S. Merkel, A. B. Kucharski, S. Schorr
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AbstractVoice operated virtual personal assistants – or smart speakers – like Amazon’s Echo or Apple’s HomePod have shown high rates of diffusion in private households in Europe and North America: Since Amazon launched the first smart speaker in the USA in 2015, 38.5% of the total US population have adopted such devices in 2020 (Petrock, 2020). Given this trend, the use of smart speakers is also becoming interesting for gerontechnology. Benefits of smart speakers for older users seem obvious: The devices can be operated despite visual impairments or limitation in mobility and smart speakers can be operated without a visual interface (see e.g. O'Brien et al., 2019; Nimrod & Edan, 2021). Companies like Amazon have started offering specific services such as “Alexa together”, that aim at supporting older persons living independently by offering multiple features like fall detection alerts and activity responses (Amazon, 2022). A recurring critique on technologies for older persons particularly within aging research is the deficit-oriented design approach. As Vines et al. (2015) point out, the mainstream public discourse on technology and aging has been dominated by images, which view aging as a societal problem and connect to more deficit-oriented images of older persons. Thus, aging processes are primarily associated with multiple declines (Peine et al., 2014) and characteristics such as frailty, immobility and passivity are stereotypically ascribed to all older persons (see e.g. Katz, 2015). Against this background, the objective of this presentation is to identify smart speaker applications for older persons and to analyze the features offered to users focusing on images of aging.Keywords: elderly, senior, older person, smart Speaker, Amazon Alexa, skills, images of aging
S. Merkel, A. B. Kucharski, S. Schorr (2022). “Computer, how do smart speakers support aging in place?” – Smart speakers and images of ageing. Gerontechnology, 21(s),3-3
https://doi.org/10.4017/gt.2022.21.s.578.3.sp7