Engaging seniors through automatically-generated photo digests from their families' social media

Abstract

Seniors are increasingly using the Internet. However, their adoption of available services such as social media is often restricted by their limited experience with new technologies. At the same time, there is significant interest in designing communication applications, especially mobile, that improve seniors' social connectedness. These are mostly implemented as dedicated social networking tools for seniors and their families. A barrier to the full adoption of such tools is the requirement for younger family members to actively manage a platform parallel to the social media tools they already use (e.g., Facebook). We propose PhotoDigest - a user-centred application that allows seniors to passively engage in their families' social media activities. PhotoDigest automatically harvests families' Facebook photo posts and delivers them to seniors as weekly digests. We conducted a preliminary deployment study and show that PhotoDigest is easily adopted by seniors, does not interfere with younger generations' life routines, and enhances the entire family's social connectedness.