Voice Assistant Use in Long-Term Care
Abstract
Research on voice assistants has primarily studied how people use them for informational needs, music requests, and to control electronic devices (e.g., IoT). Recent research suggests people such as older adults want to use them to address social and relational needs, but lacks empirical evidence to show how older adults are currently engaging in these behaviors. In this paper, we use a machine learning approach to analyze more than 600,000 queries that 456 older adults in assisted living communities made to Amazon Alexa devices over two years, classifying how older adults use voice assistants for social well-being purposes. We present empirical evidence showing how older adults engage in three primary relational behaviors with Alexa – 1) asking personal questions to "get to know" the assistant, 2) asking for advice and 3) engaging with the voice assistant to alleviate stress. We use these findings to discuss ethical implications of voice assistant use in long-term care settings.
Integrity signals
Registry
Cites
Statistics
Claims the paper makes
Claims other papers make about this one
Each is checked against this paper’s own text: does it say what the citing paper says it does?
Voice assistants have been shown to uplift older adults' spirits, provide more opportunities for mental engagement, and aid in fostering social connections.
“have been shown to uplift their spirits, provide more opportunities for mental engagement, and aid in fostering social connections [43, 59].”
From Situated Understanding of Errors in Older Adults' Interactions with Voice Assistants: A Month-Long, In-Home Study (2026) · cites this paper as [43]
No citation lists for this paper
No citation lists for this paper yet — checked again daily.
References 39 · Cited by 23
- Authors
- Oewel, B., Ammari, T., & Brewer, R. N.
- Affiliations
- University of California, Irvine (US)
- Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey (US)
- University of Michigan (US)
- Venue
- Proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Conversational User Interfaces
- Publisher
- ACM
- Published
- 2023-07-19
- Pages
- 1-10
- OpenAlex
- W4384520878
- Cited by
- 23
- References
- 39
- Citations by year
- 2026: 10 · 2025: 9 · 2024: 4
- FWCI
- 21.03
- Type
- conference paper
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
- Locations
- ACM Conference on Conversational User Interfaces (CUI) (publishedVersion)
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Demography › Technology Use by Older Adults
- Social Sciences › Psychology › Social Psychology › Social Robot Interaction and HRI
- Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Artificial Intelligence › AI in Service Interactions
- Keywords
- voice assistants, older adults, long-term care, assisted living, Amazon Alexa, social well-being, relational needs, stress reduction, advice seeking, ethical implications
About these checks
Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.
Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.
Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.
What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›
Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review
