Understanding the interplay between technology and social ties in later life: How social ties promote use of technology and how technology can promote social relationships

Meaningful social connections are an important part of our lives, especially as we age, and are associated with life satisfaction and psychological well-being. At the same time making friends and creating connections is known to be challenging in older age. In this thesis, we focus on studying how technology can help to collect information about older adults that can be useful for facilitating friendship formation and social interactions among users. We start by describing early work that shows the opportunities of technology in improving well-being of older adults. The conducted studies and review work highlights the potential of social interactions in motivating older adults for technology use and exercising. We then study factors affecting people's social connectedness and friendships. The study highlights that common life points are related to higher levels of connectedness and frequency of interactions. We then move the focus on studying friendship formation in later life, and specifically on how technology can help to facilitate friendship formation. From observations in the nursing homes we see that reminiscence is often used to collect information about a person’s history and values, we look at this practice as a way to identify information potentially useful to recommend friendships, especially in nursing homes context. We conduct Interviews and observations with nursing homes stakeholders and gerontology doctors to define requirements and opportunities of reminiscence conversational agent suitable to their current practices. We then conduct a study to explore how the concept of the bot and features are perceived by elderly, NH staff and doctors. Finally, we present the work carried out to define and validate the concept of a reminiscence-based conversational agent aimed at: i) conducting storytelling conversations that are engaging and natural and ii) being effective in collecting information about the user (e.g values, interests, places) that later can be used for recommending potential friends.