Older adults as users of conversational agents in health and social care: Designers' and developers' motivations and images of ageing
S. Merkel & S. Schorr
Full text PDF 
( Download count: 37)
AbstractThe term conversational agents (CA) encompasses various other terms and is often used interchangeably with chatbots, virtual assistants (such as Apple's Siri, Microsoft's Cortana, or Amazon's Alexa), smart agents, and more. CA are used in various fields today, including healthcare and social care. While older adults are often considered as late adopters of digital technologies, they have been identified as a central user group of CA in in these fields (Merkel & Schorr, submitted) as CA are believed to offer "more advantages than challenges." (Even et al., 2022). On one hand, the technology offers a seemingly perfect match between the purportedly low digital skills and competencies of older adults and the ease of use provided by natural language processing, which requires no knowledge of graphical interfaces. On the other hand, there is evidence that the CA and AI are seen as a “techno-fix” for ageing societies (Higgs & Gilleard, 2021). The design and the use cases of CA are influenced by images of ageing (e.g. Neven, 2010; Endter, 2017; Merkel, Kucharski & Schorr, 2022). Against this background, this article aims to analyse the motivations of designers and developers of CA. The focus is on two questions: how the development of the devices is framed and what the underlying images of ageing are.Keywords: conversation agents, healthcare, social care, images of ageing
S. Merkel & S. Schorr (2024). Older adults as users of conversational agents in health and social care: Designers' and developers' motivations and images of ageing. Gerontechnology, 23(2), 1-1
https://doi.org/10.4017/gt.2024.23.s.918.opp