T-echo: Promoting intergenerational communication through gamified social mentoring

Abstract

Intergenerational social mentoring, a mentoring system on social medium between the elderly and the young, will be the one of the platforms for the elderly to make use of their potential. The elderly could have more chances to communicate their knowledge and experience accumulated through their life to the next generations, and the young could try more challenges under the wisdom of crowds. Such systems should 1) have senior-friendly interface, 2) support the rich context-aware communication, and 3) blur some intergenerational gaps. In this paper, we propose "T-echo", a new trial system for intergenerational social mentoring. T-echo is based on the two concepts: "growing gamifictaion" and "calendar-based interface." The field study 15 elderly joined showed that the calendar-notebook interface was friendly for the elderly and have rich contexts for mentoring. Furthermore, growing gamification could be a good mediator between the elderly and the young. © 2014 Springer International Publishing.