Making TV Useful For My 94-yr-old Aunt
techenhancedlife.com
techenhancedlife.com
I say, keep it simple, keep it familiar. I am 100% sure this will backfire.
2. 20 years younger than 94 might have significantly less medical issues - to quote the article "The problem was that she has difficulty walking, and when she is sitting in her lazy boy chair, it’s tough to get up and walk to the phone to see who is calling. She gets a lot of spam calls. She also plays the TV loud and may not hear the phone ring." etc. etc.
Having one remote is big
Being able to ask Alexa to find the remote is also big, because I swear my grandmother loses that thing every week
One remote that controls everything, it has like 5 buttons on it, and one of them is a netflix button. Fantastic.
And now my dad feels like a tech wizz whenever he casts a photo/video from his phone to the tv when he wants to show his friends something.
This article's solution feels very brittle and cumbersome, which will probably increase the tech support calls.
Instead what she used most were stateless devices. Devices which you can turn off, then turn on, and then she would see the exact same starting point and have exact same path to the target. For example call on a dumbphone - she knew that she needed to unlock it via a corner button then press down on a joystick as many time as that person required. Same with TV, she knew approximately what buttons to click to get to some channel.
She had bad eyesight and it would make voice assistant even worse, because she wouldn't see what happened after each command.
My dad is 78. He knows how to use his tv and cable box. It gets a firmware update that adds some feature that is pointless to him (lets say HDR, he doesn’t give a shit) but refreshes the UI.
I feel like 10-20 years ago I could just download the old firmware onto a usb and install it over the new one for stuff like this. That concept is just unheard of now. I sort of get why from a security perspective but if that has to be the case then keep your shitty UI/UX consistent at least. Or find a secure way to allow downgrades. That’s not my expertise at all but I’m sure it can be done
and if not that way, the software still forced upgrade by getting the data from a special passive channel from the satellite.
> the software still forced upgrade by getting the data from a special passive channel from the satellite
Ok that one I haven't ever heard of, sounds unwieldy.
DirecTV 100% had self updating receivers by that point, I tried to figure out which ones were the first to get those, but they're not big on being open with info
The manual for the first receiver I remember being able to update itself says 2006, but I can't check if that's right
Edit: I did some digging around, DirecTV's RCA Receivers + Ultimate mention being able to update, and apparently those are from the early 2000's
The manuals are something else, in the internet capable models there are sections on using your TV as an Email client or making your own website
IDK, my new canal+ box seems to work fine with no internet connection. It gets the software and DRM updates the same way, simplex broadcast received from satellite
My mom loved it too
IMHO, the problem is that our ideas of discoverability and even our notions of UI from Xerox Parc are based on models for children and not on models for the elderly. People with life experiences typically want things that behave like what they know. I hope the way we design software changes as the population ages.
Short story: When it works it's no problem. She can navigate between netflix and other streaming services, but once something freeze or she has to log in or whatever she is lost. My dad is a little bit better, but he has problems understanding accounts and logins. Using your e-mail address as username is actually confusing for older folks.
And where did we ever get "really long press" as an user interface concept? Maybe for maintenance functions on things with one button, but on something with multiple controls?
If there is a dedicated easy to press "change something" button it WILL get pressed, "really long press(es)" are hidden enough that they might not be (Even if clearly labeled, people still think "techwiz" even if all you do is read the print and see that the button had another function)
My Silent Generation (pre-Boomers) parents struggled with these from before they were as old as I am now, never really got it, and are shedding device functionality daily. “My iPhone is broken again!” “Send over the TV repairman.”
I don't want incomprehensible icons everywhere. If you want those, why not just mark everything in Chinese? Chinese characters are not harder to comprehend than the unimaginative collection of spheres, wavy lines, dots, etc. that we get now, and at least you learn a new language while attempting to learn to work with the app!
I suppose that's partly also a question of how learning is affected in old age. In other words, are elderly people physically incapable of adapting?
So her interest in re-learning how to do this is diminished, because she rightfully no longer trusts that it won't change yet again. Constantly shifting UIs undermine user trust, especially for users who are further from peak learning years.
My three year old, of course, worked out how to navigate around my photos despite my never handing him my phone, and even discovered a feature I didn't know existed.
Adaptation is often slower as you age - I can see this a bit in myself now that I'm past 40. I have to more consciously learn new things than I did 20 years ago.
I'd be happy if we could just figure out how to make software reliable and performant again. Most of it is a horror-show, and only looks any good at all because computers are so fast and many of the underlying tools and infrastructure parts have gotten really good (i.e., server hardware is ridiculously fast, the Linux OS running on most servers is supremely reliable for such a complex system that needs to support a myriad array of hardware from different vendors, but the CRUD software written to run on top of this stack is hacked-together garbage.)
For everyone else looking to consolidate a settop box and tv to a no bullshit remote highly recommend
https://www.oneforall.com/universal-remotes/urc-6820-zapper#...
Gone are all the superfluous netflix or change input buttons that make your parents stuck and generate support calls.
You configure the remote for tv and when thats done you (optionaly) configure it for the settop box. At that point only the dedicated TV power button goes to tv all other keys go directly to the settop box and theres very few of them with comfortable size and best rubber quality i've seen in a remote ever.
The settopbox/tv compatibility list is not published online but spans decades and i had no problem setting up a noname one that wasn't even on the list.
Includes things like a remote finder button on top of the Roku that works pretty well.
What's wrong with they want to have soap-operas running in the background all the time? Why do these younger people feel the need to change that to "background nature shows from YT"? (and in so doing helping out a trillion-dollars behemoth).
*It's still up for debate if those shows or the news are worse for making her a bit paranoid, you'd think it'd be more clear cut, but she only brings up stuff on the news, if it goes too far we will have to make some changes
Yes, curse these hip, fresh-faced, (checks author's bio) 76-year-old whippersnappers for thinking they know better than the elderly!
And... it's also a great reminder of how challanging it is for elderly folks (AND ourselves in the future!) to deal with the horror of multiple remotes and tech they don't understand.
In the "Why Use this Website?" section on the frontpage of his site, it reads: "Get help developing products and services that older adults actually want and need."
I applaud the mission and the effort to document all of it in a guide-like fashion. Great job!
Not just elderly. I hate multiple remotes, my wife hates multiple remotes, the kids hate multiple remotes.
Multiple remotes means that your product doesn't play nice with others, and that should be a huge red flag for the future when we have plenty of tech that lets us use a single remote.
Two remotes was the moment I stopped watching TV altogether at third of her age.
Am I pointing the right device? Is the battery in any of them out? Is the bloody device not reacting of just waking up? The cable box is connected to the TV aux or it's a "smart" one connected to one of the HDMI aux'es? All this mess to watch mostly ads.
That's where the smart TVs missed the mark. When I press mute on my TV remote, it should be smart enough to figure out how to talk to other devices to mute everything.
The biggest hurdle seems to be discoverability. A physical remote makes sense, and doesn't change. Buttons have a singular function and context doesn't matter. Apps are different beasts, navigate up/down/forward/backward (thus context (what did you do before, now doing x does y, but otherwise z)) is just met with glazy eyes. Going back and front just makes no sense, why sometimes you need to go to a menu and other times it's a shortcut button, makes no sense, especially when summoning the menu needs special navigation. To add insult to injury, every now and then apps get an overhaul, and suddenly navigation and buttons changed/looked different.
Now when i say apps, i do mean apps on phones/tvs. The windows UI works for them because the basics are the same for all programs, using word or outlook, menu items have text like "send" "save" and while it takes time, functionality is discoverable. But for tv apps the logic is "click up or down until the icon you want has a different hue, then press a button on the remote to do stuff, but only when the screen shows x,not when it shows z". It's too much functionality condensed in too little UI. I'm constantly baffled by design choices for apps that are supposed to be used by everyone, I'm sure it looks nice to designers and devs, but have they even tried showing their brand new TV interface (these are the worst offenders) to an elderly and gave them simple tasks?
You still need some way to get input to swap between these digital channels (I use Plex to surface my shows and schedule), but if you have existing local content it really feels like the "old" way of doing TV. You can even add commercials between episodes if you wanted!
I'm not sure if I'd call this foolproof for a 94-year-old, especially since sometimes the software needs to restart, but it's a step above modern streaming IMO.
[0] https://github.com/vexorian/dizquetv [1] https://github.com/ErsatzTV/ErsatzTV
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I already notice a lot of difficulties to learn how to use new technologies with much younger relatives than his aunt. I think practice in learning new things and intrinsic motivation to do so is key.
Starting early to build this learning routine with older relatives is something I'm trying to do.
I wanted something like reminders and information to show on the screen next to the TV program and used a HDMI capture card along with a Raspberry Pi to essentially add an overlay to the screen but it was too finicky and the pi would often lock up (its nowhere near powerful enough).
Ideally it needs a passthrough system that can resize the source input down a bit to fit a scrolling banner at the bottom and a sidebar that family members can remotely push messages to, or have scheduled reminders with a voice over.
Common things we found needed reminders were things like remembering to drink, a reminder of someone coming round, reminders to go to bed, shower, clean your teeth, etc.
I dont think anything interactive would be a good idea in this situation. The worst thing you can do with dementia patients is introduce something new to learn so it would need to be as frictionless as possible.
I'd guess that it really depends on the person. This makes me hopeful https://newatlas.com/health-wellbeing/people-with-dementia-c...