Abstract
Active participation in everyday life and social activities is essential for older adults to maintain wellbeing. The notion of “Active Ageing” brings a new angle to understand the challenges and opportunities of emerging technologies. We report results from a survey study that compares the uses and motivations of using digital music technologies amongst middle-aged and older people and quantifies the effects of motivations. Getting social connectedness is a key predictor for more frequent use and sharing with digital music technologies. Group participation contributes to higher likelihood of using digital music technologies and more frequent use. The findings were triangulated with situated use and music group activities drawn from our prior ethnographic study. We also highlighted that age was a relevant but not prominent factor in technology use and motivation.
Highlights
Over the last two decades, HCI and human factors research around the elderly has been dominated by deficit-driven approaches when designing and developing technologies [53]
At the second stage of the analysis, we started by examining the macro-level differences between those who participated in music groups and those who did not, and further analysed the heterogeneity in these two groups
We specified a model of bundled use patterns around digital music technologies; we investigated if and how bundled use patterns differ across the two age groups
Summary
Over the last two decades, HCI and human factors research around the elderly has been dominated by deficit-driven approaches when designing and developing technologies [53]. Influenced by the social and critical gerontology literature and the notion of “active ageing” [55], researchers recently suggest a more active way to reconfigure “the old age” in HCI They argue that older adults are able to actively engage in social activities and give back to the community [5,36,37], so as to maintain social and physical wellbeing. Prior research on active ageing and music made it clear that participatory music in community contributed to the formation of social bonding, and improved wellbeing in later life via three major routes: providing purposes, supporting autonomy and control, and assisting social affirmation [2] We assumed that these routes would enable various levels of group participation and identification, with which we could contextualise technology use and motivation of the middle-aged and older adults
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