Voice Design Strategies for the Elderly Population
The United Nations reports that there are over 962 million elderly people in the world today.
By 2050, that number will have risen to 2.1 billion.
At that point, as the WHO notes separately, the elderly will make up 22% of the world’s population.
Even today, countries all over the world are facing significant challenges in providing satisfactory care to the elderly. As that demographic widens, those challenges are likely to become more difficult to address.
Technology is often brought up as a possible solution. Apart from helping those who care for the elderly to provide better quality service, technology can also make it possible for the aging population to achieve greater independence.
The challenge, however, is that some technological solutions are simply out of reach for the elderly. The fundamental design and general lack of accessibility features of some products and software make it difficult for the elderly to adopt them.
Voice design stands in stark contrast to that. Not only can elderly people learn how to use it easily, but the voice user interfaces can also be easily adapted to the needs of the elderly in ways that are beyond the capabilities of visual interfaces.
The trend already leans in that direction. Adoption of voice user interfaces among those aged 65 and older is at 20% — with one in five regularly using a voice assistant — showing a pre-existing interest to use the technology in this segment of the population.
Voice user interfaces provide numerous quality-of-life improvements that can uniquely benefit the elderly. Other benefits that voice AIs provide are central to promoting better health outcomes.
Opportunity and Use Cases
Movement and Dexterity Problems
According to the Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation Clinics of America, 26% of elderly people struggle with text input. Their challenges stem from lacking the dexterity required to type out commands, as well as beginning to face challenges with spelling as they age.
This automatically makes it difficult for the aging to use the heavily text-reliant interfaces of many mobile phone apps, along with carrying out simple commands such as browsing the web.
The same can be noted about computers, which present the same challenges, with little in the way of accessibility features to make these obstacles easier to overcome.
Voice assistants make it far easier for the elderly to operate devices in ways that take account of potential mobility issues.
Most voice user interfaces start listening for commands with only a wake-word, eliminating the need to physically interact with the device. This removal of friction greatly benefits those whose range of movement may be limited, up to 31% of the elderly.
And this makes it possible for the elderly to achieve greater independence, and to be able to take part in daily activities such as shopping and consuming media with greater ease and less external reliance.
With the rise of Internet of Things devices, they can also do much more around the home, including turning lights on and off and adjusting the heating.
Healthcare
Some of the most impactful uses of voice assistants for the elderly are related to healthcare, where increased use can potentially lead to life-saving outcomes.
With the coronavirus pandemic, face-to-face care for the elderly has become riskier, especially since they’re the most adversely affected by the virus.
With voice assistant technology, however, they can experience more holistic remote healthcare. Amazon Alexa and the National Health Service in the UK have already piloted a program that enables the elderly to receive accurate information on any health concerns they may be having.
This is also helpful for situations when they may start experiencing immediate symptoms that they’re uncertain of, with conversational AIs guiding them while they await in-person help.
Certain voice AIs can provide essential monitoring and report to emergency services and family members if they detect something wrong. An example is Koko, a voice AI that can detect when its elderly users have fallen.
Another healthcare-related use of voice assistants is coaching the elderly to engage in health-promoting activities. This has been attempted in an experiment published in the Journal of Gerontological Nursing.
The voice AIs users who took part in the experiment, all with an average age of 65, reported moderate chronic pain before they began coaching sessions through their smart speakers. At the end of five weeks, they described their pain as minor.
Loneliness
One of the problems that the elderly commonly suffer from is loneliness.
Apart from lowering their overall quality of life, loneliness increases the severity and likelihood of major health problems.
Research by the Center for Disease Control reveals that loneliness increases the risk of mortality by 45%, and it also contributes to the risk of dementia by 50%.
And according to the Pew Research Center, 27% of people aged over 60 live alone, showing the enormous scale of the problem. Also, 43% of elderly people in the United States reported feeling lonely regularly.
Voice assistants can help the elderly stave off the effects of loneliness with conversational AIs that simulate conversation to provide a sense of company.
Such an approach has been tested by Abbeyfield, an English charity that cares for the elderly. The experiment showed that voice assistants can decrease the sense of loneliness that aging people experience, leading to a more positive mood.
And voice AIs can make it easier for the elderly to stay in touch with their family members and other people in their lives. They can easily issue commands for messages to be sent to their family members and for incoming messages to be read out to them, which older users can do more easily with their voices and natural language than with the unfamiliar and often puzzling interfaces of messaging apps.
Memory Loss
With 40% of people aged 65 experiencing some form of memory impairment, that’s another area where voice assistants could assist the elderly to live with greater convenience.
Older users with memory problems can take advantage of voice AIs and use them to keep track of things they need to do. That can include exercise, taking medication, shopping for groceries, or even simple, quality-of-life reminders like catching their favorite show.
Benefits of Designing for the Elderly
Certain benefits are unique to designing for the elderly population. This demographic’s unique cases offer insights into how to make voice AIs more effective across different age groups, and it also provides an opportunity to explore further ways of embedding conversational AI in day-to-day life.
Large, Growing User Base
With 962 million elderly people in the world, there’s a large user base that would benefit from voice design that’s focused on the elderly. And as that population continues to increase, the target audience for that voice assistant niche is widening too.
And conversation AIs for the elderly have wide applications that cut across different industries. They can be used for commercial purposes for customer support to help the elderly make easier purchases, they can be installed within hospitals to offer patients greater support, and they can be used within the home to provide the elderly with greater independence. Similarly, care facilities present yet another segment for their use.
High Engagement Levels
Because the voice assistants that can be designed for the elderly range from quality-of-life enablers to those that can significantly support improved health, there’s greater room to foster high engagement levels.
This can create opportunities for designers to gather vast amounts of data that are otherwise impossible to collect without high engagement levels, which can contribute to conversation design improvements across all demographics.
This engagement is already visible in the way elderly users have ingrained tech into their lives. The Deloitte Survey of US Healthcare Consumers reports that 44% use digital solutions to monitor their health, while 57% use them to receive alerts for taking their medication.
Strategy for Designing for the Elderly
Designing for the elderly needs to account for and pre-empt the unique challenges that older users are likely to run into as they use voice assistants. Even more proactively, the strategy needs to factor in elements that may encourage the target demographic to adopt even heavier use of conversational AIs.
This requires conversation designers to be trained with an ability to zero down on the needs of a particular demographic as they flesh out their design strategy, in the way the Digital Assistant Academy teaches.
The following are some of the aspects that conversation designers need to pay attention to.
Simplicity and Consistency
While general voice design can get away with using common words that a digital native is likely to understand, designing for the elderly needs to be more careful. Its approach must be much less assumptive.
Wherever possible, conversation designers should use words that are easy for someone with a minimal tech background to grasp.
And the voice interface needs to be consistent throughout so that users can easily learn to navigate it without needing to continually memorize new commands.
The easiest way to achieve this is to keep the needed inputs simple, leveraging natural language processing to enable elderly users to access all the features without needing to change their normal talking patterns.
That consistency also nurtures trust, which is also crucial for encouraging users to explore more features that the voice user interface has.
Easy and Extensive Repeatability
With 33% of people above the age of 70 being hard of hearing but not necessarily deaf, the voice user interface needs to be designed with repeatability in mind. If a user fails to hear a response, it must be easy for them to hear it repeated once more.
Words and phrases such as, “what?”, “come again”, “I didn’t get that” have to be accounted for within the design process, along with other variations that may be local to different regions or particularly common in certain dialects.
Also, the voice assistant needs to be able to repeat itself in other words — to increase the odds that the user understands the response to their query.
It’s even more effective for the conversational AI to be able to predict why a user is asking for the output to be repeated, so it can respond with the appropriate action. That can be rephrasing, speaking more slowly, or raising the volume.
Optimizing for the Input of Elderly Users
Speech patterns change as people age, so voice AIs that are entirely based on processing the commands of younger commands may fail to serve older users.
Voice AIs designed explicitly with the elderly in mind need to be optimized to process their queries in the ways that they speak, and this can be adapted across different dialects and regions for greater diversity.
Apart from speech patterns, the conversation AIs also have to account for speech impediments that commonly arise as people age.
They need to be designed with a greater capacity for recognizing and understanding slow speech, labored speaking, stutters, and other features of talking that are common among the elderly.
Ideally, the voice AI should also be customizable, so that elderly users can easily personalize it to the wake-words and speaking patterns that come naturally to them.
Frequent Reminders and Tutorials
The voice AI can help the elderly to use it better if it actively suggests features for them to try out. If the user appears unaware of a particular feature, gentle nudges can encourage them to explore it.
Examples of questions that the voice AI can ask for this purpose include:
i. Jane, you don’t have to turn the lights on every evening. Do you want me to show you how to make them switch on when it gets dark?
ii. Hi, Jane. You haven’t asked me to send a message for you in a while. When you want to, just call my name, say who you want me to send the message to, and tell me what you’d like to say.
Voice designers can also enable the conversation AI to walk the user through a full tutorial, so they can quickly remember some of the features that they might have forgotten.
Closing Thoughts
The elderly population can derive unique benefits from the adoption of voice AIs, and these touch on crucial areas of their lives — including those that can help them to live with greater health, fulfillment, and convenience.
Before that can happen, however, the challenges they face need to be addressed from a fundamental design standpoint. Once that step has been taken, conversation designers can create voice user interfaces that are truly capable of serving the elderly.
