Hidden Opportunities for Elder Living : Understanding Shared Technology Troubles and Benefits for Older Adults in the UK Cost of Living Crisis

Soubutts, Ewan and Singh, Aneesha and Ashcroft, Alice and Knowles, Bran and McDowell, Julia and Tsouvalis, Judith and Fledderjohann, Jasmine and Swarbrick, Caroline and Harper, R.H.R. and Rogers, Yvonne (2025) Hidden Opportunities for Elder Living : Understanding Shared Technology Troubles and Benefits for Older Adults in the UK Cost of Living Crisis. In: CHI 2025 ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems :. ACM, JPN. (In Press)

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Abstract

The uptake of digital technology by older adults and service-providers has been partly driven by the pandemic but more recently by the erosion of in-person services because of increasing austerity and a harsher global economic climate. Against the backdrop of the UK’s cost of living crisis, we examine technology used frequently within five older adults’ households. Through two rounds of in- terviews and participant diaries, we show benefits and struggles of participants’ costly technology use, reflecting on what ‘cost of living’ means when technology designed to simplify older peoples lives, encounters problems. For HCI practitioners, we provide evi- dence of how personal smart devices can be better tailored to help older adults support themselves both economically and practically, during the cost of living crisis. We propose avenues for future re- search and design that better support indirect costs and reflect on how personal devices can be made self-sustaining, integrated and repairable.