Familiarity as a factor in designing finger gestures for elderly users

Abstract

Older adults often struggle with everyday technology which is not designed to accommodate their special needs and adapted to their specific cognitive, sensory and motor abilities. Recently, a new generation of mobile devices has been equipped with multitouch and acceleration sensors that allow for novel ways of interacting with these devices. Interaction occurs through gestures, such as finger movements on the device surface or movement patterns of the device itself, which trigger the device functions. It remains unclear, however, whether this gesture-based interaction indeed facilitates technology interaction, especially with regard to elderly users, or whether it further decreases accessibility and usability of such devices for this user group. In the present study we compare younger and older users on a set of 42 simple gestures with varying complexity and available gesture space regarding accuracy and velocity scales. Results indicate that older users are slower, but not necessarily less accurate, and that further factors such as familiarity can influence gesture performance differentially for older and younger users.