Technology has recently begun to be explored as a way to cope with the challenges related to the aging of the population. However, while many technological systems for older adults have entered the ...market, the rate of adoption is low despite the potential benefits they intend to provide. The market response suggests that older adults' adoption of technology is not simply a matter of performance and price, but a complex issue that is affected by multiple factors. To address the issue in a more comprehensive way, this review study identifies factors that influence older adults' perceptions and decisions around adoption and use of technology‐enabled products and services with an integration of related findings from various fields. Based on a survey of related studies, 10 factors—value, usability, affordability, accessibility, technical support, social support, emotion, independence, experience, and confidence—are identified as the facilitators or determinants of older adults' adoption of technology. While previous studies have focused on detailed design and physical ease‐of‐use, the 10 factors provide a holistic framework that covers social contexts of use and delivery and communication channels as well as individual characteristics and technical features. This paper describes the factors with empirical evidence and design implications. The goal of this paper is to provide a base for a more comprehensive understanding of older adults as users and consumers of technology; to inform designers, developers, and managers about practical implications; and to set a research agenda for future studies in related fields.
Role theory suggests occupying simultaneous family caregiving and employment roles in midlife may exert positive and negative effects on psychological health. However, there is a lack of causal ...evidence examining the degree to which combinations of these roles influence psychological health at the intersection of gender and racial identity.
Longitudinal data from the Health and Retirement Study (2004-2018) are used to estimate a series of individual fixed effects models examining combinations of employment status and parental caregiving situation on Center for Epidemiological Studies-Depression Scale (CES-D) depression scores among Black and White men and women aged 50-65. Subsequent models were stratified by intensity of caregiving situation and work schedule.
Individual fixed effects models demonstrate combining work, and parental caregiving is associated with greater depressive symptoms than only working, and with lower depressive symptoms than only caregiving, suggesting that paid employment exerts a protective effect on psychological health whereas parental caregiving may be a risk factor for depressive symptoms in later life. Analyses using an intersectional lens found that combining paid work with parental caregiving exerted a protective effect on CES-D scores among White women and men regardless of participants' intensity of care situation or work schedule. This effect was not present for Black men and women.
Accounting for intersectionality is imperative to research on family caregiving, work, and psychological health.
Artificial intelligence (AI) models for decision support have been developed for clinical settings such as radiology, but little work evaluates the potential impact of such systems. In this study, ...physicians received chest X-rays and diagnostic advice, some of which was inaccurate, and were asked to evaluate advice quality and make diagnoses. All advice was generated by human experts, but some was labeled as coming from an AI system. As a group, radiologists rated advice as lower quality when it appeared to come from an AI system; physicians with less task-expertise did not. Diagnostic accuracy was significantly worse when participants received inaccurate advice, regardless of the purported source. This work raises important considerations for how advice, AI and non-AI, should be deployed in clinical environments.
Objective: To assess the sensitivity of two physiological measures for discriminating between levels of cognitive demand under driving conditions across different age groups.
Background: Previous ...driving research presents a mixed picture concerning the sensitivity of physiological measures for differentiating tasks with presumed differences in mental workload.
Method: A total of 108 relatively healthy drivers balanced by gender and across three age groups (20–29, 40–49, 60–69) engaged in three difficulty levels of an auditory presentation–verbal response working memory task.
Results: Heart rate and skin conductance level (SCL) both increased in a statistically significant fashion with each incremental increase in cognitive demand, whereas driving performance measures did not provide incremental discrimination. SCL was lower in the 40s and 60s age groups; however, the pattern of incremental increase with higher demand was consistent for heart rate and SCL across all age groups. Although each measure was quite sensitive at the group level, considering both SCL and heart rate improved detection of periods of heightened cognitive demand at the individual level.
Conclusion: The data provide clear evidence that two basic physiological measures can be utilized under field conditions to differentiate multiple levels of objectively defined changes in cognitive demand. Methodological considerations, including task engagement, may account for some of the inconsistencies in previous research.
Application: These findings increase the confidence with which these measures may be applied to assess relative differences in mental workload when developing and optimizing human machine interface (HMI) designs and in exploring their potential role in advanced workload detection and augmented cognition systems.
Self‐driving vehicles will affect the future of transportation, but factors that underlie perception and acceptance of self‐driving cars are yet unclear. Research on feelings as information and the ...affect heuristic has suggested that feelings are an important source of information, especially in situations of complexity and uncertainty. In this study (N = 1,484), we investigated how feelings related to traditional driving affect risk perception, benefit perception, and trust related to self‐driving cars as well as people's acceptance of the technology. Due to limited experiences with and knowledge of self‐driving cars, we expected that feelings related to a similar experience, namely, driving regular cars, would influence judgments of self‐driving cars. Our results support this assumption. While positive feelings of enjoyment predicted higher benefit perception and trust, negative affect predicted higher risk and higher benefit perception of self‐driving cars. Feelings of control were inversely related to risk and benefit perception, which is in line with research on the affect heuristic. Furthermore, negative affect was an important source of information for judgments of use and acceptance. Interest in using a self‐driving car was also predicted by lower risk perception, higher benefit perception, and higher levels of trust in the technology. Although people's individual experiences with advanced vehicle technologies and knowledge were associated with perceptions and acceptance, many simply have never been exposed to the technology and know little about it. In the absence of this experience or knowledge, all that is left is the knowledge, experience, and feelings they have related to regular driving.
This study examined the sensitivity of heart rate, skin conductance, and respiration rate as measures of mental workload in a simulated driving environment. Workload was systematically manipulated by ...using increasingly difficult levels of a secondary cognitive task. In a sample of 121 young adults, heart rate increased incrementally with increasing task demand. Significant elevations in skin conductance and respiration rate were also observed. At the lower levels of added workload, secondary task performance was nearly perfect and changes in indices of driving performance were negligible. At the highest level of workload, all three physiological measures appeared to plateau, and a subtle drop in simulated driving performance became detectable. Taken together, the pattern of results indicates that physiological measures can be sensitive to changes in workload before the appearance of clear decrements in driving performance. These findings further highlight a role for physiological monitoring as a means to measure mental workload in product design and functionality research. They also support work exploring the potential for incorporating physiological measures of driver workload and attentional state in future safety systems.
Objective: The aim of this study was to assess sensitivity of visual attention and driving performance for detecting changes in driver cognitive workload across different age groups.
Background: The ...literature shows mixed results concerning the sensitivity of gaze concentration metrics to variations in cognitive demand. No studies appear showing how age affects gaze allocation during cognitive demand.
Method: Recordings of drivers’ gaze and driving performance by individuals in their 20s, 40s, and 60s were captured in actual driving conditions during three levels of cognitive demand.
Results: Gaze concentration increased with task difficulty through the low and moderate levels of demand and then appeared to level out at the high demand level. At the moderate difficulty level, gaze concentration increased by 2.4 cm (≈2°) from the reference period. The degree of gaze concentration with added cognitive demand is not related to age in the relatively healthy drivers studied. Driving performance measures did not show a consistent relationship with the objective demand level.
Conclusion: Gaze concentration appears at low levels of cognitive demand prior to the appearance of marked decrements in driving control. There is no compelling evidence from this study that driving performance measures can be used to index differences in workload prior to capacity saturation.
Application: Drivers’ awareness of vehicle surroundings is incrementally affected by increases in cognitive demand. Developers of more advanced driver support systems should consider gaze concentration as a measure of driver cognitive workload. This recommendation is particularly relevant in light of the added benefits of gaze measurements for detecting visual demand.
Keywords: mental workload, cognitive distraction, eye movements, visual tunneling, driving safety, situational awareness, voice interfaces, cellular telephones
Travel Time and Subjective Well-Being Choi, Janet; Coughlin, Joseph F.; D'Ambrosio, Lisa
Transportation research record,
2013, Letnik:
2357, Številka:
1
Journal Article
Recenzirano
This paper explores the relative impacts of commute time on subjective well-being (SWB) with data from a Gallup–Healthways survey. Two different measures of SWB—a comprehensive measure of overall ...well-being and whether people experienced happiness for most of the day yesterday—are analyzed to address various definitions of SWB. The first measure takes a global view of SWB that encompasses both experienced and remembered utility, and the second measure looks at SWB as experienced utility dealing with feelings of happiness. With ordinary least squares and logit regression models, commute time is found to be statistically significant and negatively related to both the global evaluation of SWB and the experientially focused measure of SWB. Because this study uses 4 years of well-being data from the United States, results provide robust support that commute time does have a significant role in well-being in this country. The analysis also finds a strong correlation between commute time and congestion, which suggests that effective policies to reduce congestion can be one method of improving SWB for large segments of the population.
•We investigate glances and vehicle control while driving past a digital billboard on the highway.•We compare behavior when drivers passed the same double-sided billboard in two directions.•We show ...increased number and duration of glances toward the billboard regardless of direction.•Glances off road and toward the billboard significantly increase in its presence.•Glances toward the billboard increase at the time the billboard switches.
Developments in lighting technologies have allowed more dynamic digital billboards in locations visible from the roadway. Decades of laboratory research have shown that rapidly changing or moving stimuli presented in peripheral vision tends to ‘capture’ covert attention. We report naturalistic glance and driving behavior of a large sample of drivers who were exposed to two digital billboards on a segment of highway largely free from extraneous signage. Results show a significant shift in the number and length of glances toward the billboards and an increased percentage of time glancing off road in their presence. Findings were particularly evident at the time the billboards transitioned between advertisements. Since rapidly changing stimuli are difficult to ignore, the planned increase in episodically changing digital displays near the roadway may be argued to be a potential safety concern. The impact of digital billboards on driver safety and the need for continued research are discussed.
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