An empirical study of older adult’s voice assistant use for health information seeking.

Brewer, R., Pierce, C., Upadhyay, P., & Park, L. (2022). An empirical study of older adult’s voice assistant use for health information seeking. ACM Transactions on Interactive Intelligent Systems (TiiS), 12(2), Article 13, 1-32. https://doi.org/10.1145/3484507

This study investigates how adults aged 65+ use voice assistants for health-related information seeking. A survey of 201 older adults revealed that while voice assistants were primarily used for confirmatory health queries, users exhibited distrust in their reliability. In follow-up scenario-based interviews with 35 participants, issues arose from conversational breakdowns due to the human-like expectations placed on voice assistants. The study provides a detailed analysis of query reformulation and highlights the need for improved voice interfaces to better support older adults in navigating complex health information.