Designing Intelligent Voice Assistants for Older Adults' Collaborative Care: Exploring Supportive and Non-Supportive Interactions
Pegah Karimi, Aqueasha M. Martin-Hammond · Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction · 2025
Intelligent voice assistants (IVAs) have the potential to facilitate health information tasks among older adults and caregivers. However, when adopting these tools, older adults face a significant challenge balancing needs for support versus values, such as privacy and control. This paper explores older adults' expectations of IVAs that support collaborative health information tasks. We conducted semi-structured interviews with ten older adult-informal caregiver dyads and nine older adults who collaborate with formal caregivers to manage their health (n=29). To identify factors that influence supportive and non-supportive interactions in caregiving relationships, we use an existing model to examine collaborative care experiences within older adult-caregiver dynamics and perceptions of emerging IVAs that support similar activities. We learned that expectations of emerging IVA interactions overlap with those within human caregiving relationships. We discuss implications for designing IVAs for collaborative health information tasks that address needs for control, trust, transparency, and personability and the need to further explore designing for support versus care.