Tangible User Interface for Social Interactions for The Elderly: a Review of Literature

To begin with, the ageing population faces the challenge of social isolation and loneliness along with health-related problems. The research article about the Tangible User Interface aims to review the existing research on TUI (Tangible User Interface) in order to enhance the social interaction between elderly people. Basically, Tangible User Interface bridges the gap between the digital world and the physical world by means of giving the physical form to digital information.

Almost much of our daily life become digitalized as an example; from physical calculators to calculator in computers and mobile phones, from physical walk-ins to bank to processing all the bank related tasks through electronic banking. The author Ishii and Ullmer introduced the vision “Tangible Interface”. Basically, by coupling digital information with everyday physical objects and architectural surfaces, the interaction between humans and digital information can be enhanced from its traditional Graphical User Interface. The main difference between traditional GUI and Tangible User Interface is that TUI does not make a distinction between input and output.

According to the authors there are three main characteristics of TUI:

1. Physical representations are computationally coupled to underlying digital information.
2. Physical representations embody mechanisms for interactive control.
3. Physical representations are perceptually coupled to actively mediated digital representation.

TUI is good in five types of task; Information storage, retrieval, and manipulation; Information Visualization; Modelling and Simulation; Systems Management, configuration and control; Education, entertainment, and programming systems. At first, the review was planned in order to identify, how actually does TUI impact the social interactions of elderly people or have the elderly people being involved in the process of design and development of TUI prototype, and if so, in what all ways. After conducting the review, they identified three main search terms, and they were “elderly”, “Tangible User Interface,” and “social”. Basically, the author would focus the research on some targeted criteria such as group of research paper must be older adults who are generally above 50, it must focus on the social aspects, primary focus on TUI was using everyday objects and not a whole environment or unfamiliar object. Two researches conducted the search from 20 June 2017 to 10 July 2017, four electronic databases were used in performing the search.

Moreover, combining the main search terms and inclusions and exclusion criteria, the generated search string was elderly AND “tangible user interface” AND social AND NOT robot AND NOT “smart home” AND NOT “ambient intelligence”. Total records identified through database search and other sources from two searches are 335 papers. After removing duplicates are 235 papers. From amongst the 235 paper, in detailed research was screened to determine if the papers fulfilled all the inclusion and exclusion criteria. In general, 21 research papers were included as relevant papers that uses the concept of TUI in enhancing social interactions of elderly people. From amongst all, most of the paper aimed at designing, developing and evaluating their prototype which targeted to express loneliness and social exclusion among elderly people.

Also, six research papers were such which involves user in iterative process of requirement gathering, design, development and testing. Others involved users to identify their requirements. For instance, Zhao et al conducted interviews with 10 elderly people in their first design study, while the other authors semi structured interviews with six email-using elderly participants. Basically, the review results indicate very little use of Tangible User Interface to enhance older adult’s social interactions. The number of papers selected showed the lack of research in using TUI for elderly people’s social interactions. The search results had many research works related to touch gestures, such as tablet based or mobile based application because touch gestures are also a kind of Tangible User Interface. However, the research was based on the TUI that used Tangible Bits. Also, it came to the notice that very few papers focused on social interaction of elderly people.

As a result, there was no defined quality criteria, and only presented the works done. Basically, from all of the above it clearly indicates very little use of TUI in making an impact in elderly people’s social interactions. To sum up, in order to obtain Tangible User Interface that can contribute to enhance the social interactions among elderly people and consequently improve their general well-being, the elderly people should be involved throughout the whole process of design, development and testing iterations.