The Wisdom of Older Technology (Non-)Users

Older adults consistently reject digital technology even when designed to be accessible and trustworthy

An Integrated Model for User Attribute Discovery: A Case Study on Political Affiliation Identification

Discovering user demographic attributes from social media is a problem of considerable interest. The problem setting can be generalized to include three components - users, topics and behaviors. In recent studies on this problem, however, the behavior between users and topics are not effectively incorporated. In our work, we proposed an integrated unsupervised model which takes into consideration all the three components integral to the task. Furthermore, our model incorporates collaborative filtering with probabilistic matrix factorization to solve the data sparsity problem, a computational challenge common to all such tasks. We evaluated our method on a case study of user political affiliation identification, and compared against state-of-the-art baselines. Our model achieved an accuracy of 70.1% for user party detection task. ? 2014 Springer International Publishing.EI

TECHNOLOGY AND WORK: IMPLICATIONS FOR OLDER WORKERS AND ORGANIZATIONS

Two demographic trends are shaping today’s work environment: the rapid influx of technology and the increase in the number of older workers. Technology is reshaping work processes, the content of jobs, where work is performed, communication strategies, and the delivery of education and training. These workplace changes are creating both opportunities and challenges for older workers. For example, telework offers people the opportunity to work at home with more flexible work schedules. However, continual evolvements in technology mean that workers need to continually engage in training and update their skills. This presentation will discuss the potential impact of the continual deployment of technology in the workplace on older workers. Data will be presented from the Center for Research on Aging and Technology Enhancement (CREATE) on barriers older adults confront when seeking employment, studies examining training older workers to learn new technology skills, and managerial attitudes towards older workers as teleworkers

IMPROVING COGNITIVE AND FUNCTIONAL SKILLS IN OLDER ADULTS WITH SMI

Cognitive and functional skills training interventions have been shown to improve the everyday functioning of people with severe mental illness, but little attention has specifically been directed at older patients. In two studies, we used technology-based interventions aimed at treatment of cognitive and functional deficits in older patients with severe mental illness to determine whether abbreviated technology oriented training could reduce cognitive and functional skills deficits. In the first study, 40 older patients with schizophrenia were treated with either 15 sessions of cognitive remediation therapy with the Brain HQ program from Posit science or a computer games control. In the second study 20 older schizophrenia patients and 20 healthy older controls were treated with a computerized skills training program. The skills training program led to substantial gains in performance with healthy controls and SMI patients reducing their time to completion of both by over 50% tasks in 4 training sessions

AN INTERVENTION TARGETING PATIENTS WITH AD AND THEIR CAREGIVERS

The prevalence of Alzhiemer’s Disease (AD) is increasing with a related increase in burden on family members and society. There is a need to identify interventions that decrease the cognitive/behavioral manifestations of the disease in the patient, and the distress and health-related consequences experienced by family caregivers (CGs). This paper will present data from a pilot project that is evaluating the feasibility and acceptability of an integrated innovative technology-based dyadic intervention (DT). The patient component is designed to train both cognitive and real world functional skills The CG component is designed to enhance the CG’s skills, preparedness for the caregiver role, available resources, and reduce known areas of CG risk. The sample includes Hispanic and White American individuals with mild AD and their CGs who are randomly assigned to the DT intervention or a control condition that combines cognitive stimulation exercises for the patient and nutrition/wellness counseling for the CG

A note on computer analysis of a thermocouple-based respiration signal for assessing human-computer interactive task performance

This note discusses a procedure for computer analysis of the respiration signal as obtained from a thermocouple transducer. Emphasis is given to: (1) the need for a sensor that is relatively insensitive to movement artifacts; (2) the development of a computer algorithm capable of dealing with the ill-defined character of the respiratory waveform; and (3) a procedure for validating the results of computer analysis. The discussion is within the context of assessing job design of computer-interactive tasks for older persons