The Effects of Familiarity Design on the Adoption of Wellness Games by the Elderly

The elderly often struggle when interacting with technologies. This is because the software and hardware components of the technologies are not familiar to the elderly´s mental model. This is a lack of empirical studies about how the concept of familiarity can be infused into the design of interactive technology systems to bridge the digital divide preventing today´s elderly people from actively engaging with such technologies. In this paper, we investigate the impact of familiarity in design on the adoption of wellness games for the elderly. We propose a familiarity design framework with three familiarity design elements: 1) symbolic familiarity, 2) cultural familiarity, and 3) actionable familiarity. We then conduct a focused group study involving 10 people over 65 years old to experience two wellnesses games - one with familiarity based design considerations and one without. The results shows that familiarity in design improves the perceived satisfaction and adoption likelihood significantly among the elderly users. These results can potentially benefit intelligent interface agent designed to interact with elderly users.