How unfamiliar words in smartphone manuals affect senior citizens

Abstract

Elderly people are motivated to continue working, but may have difficulties working in full-time jobs and need flexible working styles to compensate for their declining physical abilities. ICT can help support flexible working styles by enhancing communication between people in distant places. Smartphones offer various features for communication and information gathering, thus creating more opportunities to work. However, smartphone adoption has been slow for the elderly. One of the reasons is that elderly people have lower familiarity with computer terminology and therefore find the manuals difficult to understand. In this study, we investigated factors that make smartphone manuals hard to understand. We first asked elderly people about their familiarity with words found in smartphone manuals. Our second survey asked about sentences extracted from the smartphone manuals. By analyzing these results, we found that the comprehension was highly correlated with their familiarity with the specialized vocabulary. © 2013 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.