This document discusses designing social media services to engage senior citizens. It notes that most social media has focused on younger users and that seniors make up an increasing portion of populations. The challenges of bridging the "generation gap" in technology use are discussed. The project aims to use participatory design methods like cartographic mapping to involve seniors in developing a social media service tailored for their experiences and delivered through smart TVs. The expected outcomes are actively engaging seniors throughout the design process and deploying a social media service that strengthens their participation and connections through accessible interfaces adapted to their needs and wishes.

1. @ctive Life: Social Engagement of Senior
Citizens using Social Media through Smart TV
Christina Mörtberg
christina.mortberg@lnu.se
Arianit Kurti
arianit.kurti@lnu.se

2. Interaction and mobility : A short history
• Mainframe computers
• one-to-many (one computer, many users, low level of
mobility)
• Personal computers
• one-to-one (one computer, one user, increased level of
mobility)
• Mobile computers
• many-to-one (many computers, one user, high level of
mobility)
• Ubiquitous computers
• many-to-many (many computers, many users, toward
invisibility)

3. … and then, back to the beginning – “The Cloud”
• One-to-many (“one” computer, many “users”, but invisible)

4. Emerging Concepts
• Socializing Web: “Socializing is something that people used to do on
the web; gradually is becoming the web”. Rennie & Zorpettet (2011)
• Internet of Things (IoT): “The unifying infrastructure for all the
resources on the world that gives us not only control of the things
around us, but also keeping us informed of the state of the things
around us”. Gigli & Koo (2011)
• Mobile Sensing: “Wearable sensors, in contrast, transform people into
mobile sensors for both personal and ambient environment
monitoring”. Zhang et al., (2011)
• Social and Community Intelligence (Zhang, Guo & Yu, 2011) &
Crowdservicing (Davis, 2011)

5. Social Media Demographics

6. Main challenges
• Social Media applications has been designed and implemented taking into the
consideration primarily the requirements and needs of younger generation.
• Anyhow today we are experiencing the increased life expectancy trends
(Salomon et al. 2013).
• In Sweden currently the life expectancy is 82 years for women and 77 for
men while the total number of senior citizens (65+) is almost 20% of the
overall population.
• Despite this still we have a small portion (around 2%) of the social media
users that are 65+ years oldhttp://royal.pingdom.com/2012/08/21/report-
social-network-demographics-in-2012/
• Social media applications have created the so call “generation gap” on how
the ICT tools are used among people (Dowling-Mardon et al., 2013)

7. The technology landscape

8. Technology and people
• Telephone has been around for more the 100 years
• TV for around 80 years.
•
• Personal computers for around 30 years.
• Smartphones and handheld tablets for less then 10 years

9. The convergence challenge

10. The problem we aim to address
• How to design an innovative service based on
social media that supports engagement and
participation of seniors, using the Smart TV as a
platform?

11. Why Participatory Design?
• Having a say
• Mutual learning
• Co-realization
(Bratteteig et al (2012)

12. Engaging the users
• Use of participative methods to involve senior citizens
e.g. cartographic mappings. (Elovaara & Mörtberg 2010)
• Promote the users to develop a map of an active day by
identifying the:
• The key activities
• Daily interactions with other persons,
• Use of existing technologies,
• And wishes future engagement

13. Example of Cartographic Maps

14. What we expect?

15. Expected outcomes
• Actively engagement of seniors through all phases of this
project.
• Design, develop, and deploy a social media service
specifically tailored to seniors’ experiences and demands.
This includes a social media service for social
engagement and information exchange for seniors that
will closely follow the standards for web accessibility.
• Strengthen active participation of the seniors by enabling
their direct connections using user interfaces and services
adapted to their experiences and wishes.

16. Questions and comments?