What’s Up: Fostering Intergenerational Social Interactions

Among the many factors that affect wellbeing, social relationships are undoubtedly one of the most important ones. As we grow old, however, our ability to maintain and nurture them is challenged by a wide range of age-related changes that hinder our perceptual, cognitive and psychomotor capabilities. In this paper, we present a mobile communication platform specifically designed to foster social interactions between elderly users and their friends and family. To validate our solution and gain further understanding of the needs of elderly from a design perspective, a “think aloud” study was conducted, investigating the usability and applicability of our solution. This study and its results are described in this paper, showing how a simple, almost featureless, interface is suitable for the oldest group of users and informing our design about different interaction issues to take into account for the future development of our platform.