Older adults need training, support and technology designed to meet their needs, says ISL speaker Bo Xie

Conventional wisdom has it that older adults can’t figure out digital technology. Bo Xie, an expert on technology and older adults at the University of Texas at Austin, is having none of that.

It’s not that older adults lack the ability to use technology, she said in an interview in advance of her May 13 talk as part of the Institute for Successful Longevity Speaker Series. What older adults actually lack is access and adequate training. Access means affordable Internet service that is easy to use and good, reliable hardware designed for older hands and eyes — not a grandson’s outdated iPhone 5 — and training means reliable, understandable tech support.

All this is critical, in Xie’s view, as older adults enter the digital health era. “People need
to have, as part of their basic human rights, access to digital information, digital services,” she said. The digital world, however, is way behind in meeting these basic needs.

Xie will talk about these and other issues in her address “Aging in the Digital Health Era” at 4 p.m. May 13. Her talk will be via Zoom and is open to the public. To get the Zoom link, please send an email message to ISL@fsu.edu.

As a professor in the University of Texas at Austin’s School of Nursing and School of Information, Xie conducts research focused on understanding the needs of older adults for health information and services and on how technology can be designed and used to meet these needs. Her research has implications for reducing digital inequalities and ensuring patient-centered care in the digital health era.

In the modern world, Xie says, digital access is critically necessary, and funding is essential. Her project in Austin to provide access to older adults is supported by the National Institute on Aging, but funding, she says, does not have to come from the federal government. “So long as there is funding, it could be coming from anywhere,” she said. The support is needed, she argued, to hire and train people to help older adults get digital technology working. This is hard work, she cautioned, and proper training is a requirement.

Xie trains students to help older adults with their digital literacy, but she stresses the benefit of training older adults, too, to be mentors for their peers. “This peer-learning aspect actually can be very useful because sometimes for people who know so much, who have so much more experience with technology, we may forget what it’s like not to have sufficient knowledge and not to know how to learn about it,” she said. “But if you are learning from someone who’s just maybe one step ahead or maybe a half-step ahead, it’s a lot easier to communicate, and it is a lot easier for the mentor to understand the struggles people are going through.” Training older adults, Xie said, is central to bridging the age digital divide.

Another issue, she said, is design. Digital equipment is seldom created with older adults in mind.

“In my work, I focus on two key aspects,” Xi said. “One is to help improve older adults’ literacy, specifically eHealth literacy. The other aspect is to try to design technology that is age appropriate, that is senior-friendly. The concept I have been using in my study is that older adults are relevant but absent from technology design.”

A key cause, she said, is that the field of design is full of young men and women who are unaware of the needs of older individuals. “Designers are not older adults,” she said. “Often they have no clue how older adults would react to the technology they design. Often the designers have this mentality that if you design it, if you build it, people will use it. But that is so not true. We need to make sure technology is really user-friendly…. It really takes a lot of effort,” she said, “and oftentimes the designers don’t want to invite end users into the design process early on.”

This design-first, get-feedback-later approach created problems when states and communities responded to the pandemic, Xie said. “We’re seeing some of that now with the web access to register for your COVID-19 vaccines,” she said. “A lot of people find it not user-friendly, and particularly older adults just feel shut out. And, of course, you also have the problem of the digital divide — it’s almost a requirement that you have high-speed Internet access. Some people do, some people don’t.”

Even her colleagues and students have struggled with setting up vaccine registration for their parents and grandparents. “The web design is so bad,” she said. “They were like, ‘Well it took the whole day to figure this out. How could my parents or grandparents possibly have done this by themselves?’ It shouldn’t be this hard.”

These problems are manifold, and the solutions will have to be as well. Xie said the process starts with changing perceptions. “Designing a technology that can work for everybody, it really requires a mindset change,” she said. “Also, I think as advocates for older adults who want to adopt the technology we need to be more conscious to intentionally reach out to try to change people’s mindsets…. We need to go against the ageism, the stereotypes against old people.”

Part of this mindset reform is getting across that “older people” embraces individuals of many backgrounds, ages, experiences and skills. “The older population is very diverse,” Xie said. “What counts as ‘older’ is very debatable. There are different definitions, but if we say 65-plus, well, a 65-plus technology user is very different from someone who’s maybe 95 years old and also very different from someone who has not used a computer in their entire life versus someone who’s been using technology for years, like a computer-science professor.”

Understanding this complexity and coming to terms with it, incorporating it into our technology strategies and our technology designs is key, Xie said. “We need to really take into account that diversity aspect,” she said. “The older population is very diverse. How are we going to design technology that would work for everybody?  It’s a huge challenge, but at least we can get started thinking how we can change people’s mindsets.”