Versatile Question-Answer Cards to Collect Personal Profiles from Seniors

Abstract

Senior citizens often feel excluded from the digital world, leading to social isolation and preventing them from using personalized services to improve the quality of their lives. This can be caused by their limited skills with and passive attitudes towards the use of technologies. We tested a question-answer (Q&A) card interface to help senior citizens actively expose their personal experience, knowledge, and interests. A total of 50 senior participants answered 30,944 questions in six categories during the three months of our experiment, which indicated the Q&A interface effectively reduced the barriers for senior users to expose their profile information online. We also discuss some ways to analyze the collected data to investigate the profiles of senior citizens for the support of other new services. © Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2014.