Designing tangible technologies to support seniors social connections

Abstract

As mobility and health decline with age, and as technology becomes more complex, many seniors face barriers to staying socially connected with friends and family at a distance. Games are a key way to create social connections, but online games often require complex interfaces that pose barriers to seniors’ participation. Tangible interfaces that provide physical objects as input and output for interactive systems may provide an intuitive alternative, but their suitability for this demographic has not been well studied. To address this, we iteratively designed tangible interfaces for an online card game, moving from an initial AR-based system (limited by tracking issues) to a final e-ink playing card design that reduced accessibility barriers. Seniors believed the e-ink system was fun and could support remote play. Our work demonstrates how novel play interfaces can be designed and built to reduce the barriers seniors face in connecting with others around social play.