Connecting family members via the web.
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Central Problem Statement: Elderly people find it difficult to use technology to connect with their younger family members.
For elderly members of society, the desire to connect with loved ones is critical, yet often unfulfilled due to the busy schedules of younger relatives and obstacles adopting modern technology for communication.
Note: Names of interviewees have been changed to preserve anonymity.
Randy is an 80-year-old retired physicist who now does research on 19th-century American history, an activity that keeps him busy despite having a flexible schedule. He lives with his wife (from a second marriage) and cat in Amherst, Massachusetts, and has three sons who all reside in other states. Randy started using email in the 1990’s for work reasons and now has numerous contacts saved in his Outlook account. He appreciates that auto-complete allows him to send emails by only entering the first few letters of the addressee’s name. To avoid sending to the wrong person due to auto-complete, Randy now remembers to glance at the addressee field twice before sending.
Randy sees his children and grandchildren about once a year, and on occasion when he is in the area for a conference. The one time he is certain he will speak with them is over the phone on Christmas. He looks up phone numbers either taped to his refrigerator or manually entered in his Outlook address book, and dials his family on his home landline. Outside of Christmas, Randy typically prefers to contact his grandchildren via email to avoid interrupting them while they are in class or in lab: “maybe they are in the meeting with their advisor, I don’t want to alarm them.” He also indicates that he never uses his cell phone, but rather keeps it in the glove compartment of his car mostly for emergency or meet-up purposes. Hence, the number of contacts in his cell phone is very limited.
Randy exchanges emails with his children when one of them sees and forwards an interesting online news article. He also uses email to arrange meetups with his MIT grandchildren if he knows he will be in Boston soon. Otherwise, he sometimes receives emails from another grandchild in the form of “Hi grandpa, will you sponsor a team in this fantasy baseball league?” Randy has only used videochatting once or twice when his step-daughter wanted to show him her new cat. For photographs, he sometimes emails or snail-mails a CD of uploaded pictures taken of family members at reunions. Overall, Randy does not feel a need for better technology for communicating with his family other than “convenient speed of light transportation” so that he can see them more often, since flying is a hassle.
Lessons learned:
Susan is a 70 year old woman with 8 grandchildren, two of which she helped raise on a daily basis. She currently lives with her daughter and son in law, but since they spend most of their time at work, most of her day is spent alone at the house. She calls her grandchildren from time to time, especially on the holidays, but she still has trouble connecting with them.
Lessons learned:
David is a grandfather living in China. His grandson studies in a prestigious university in the United States, and rarely has any time to contact David. David’s daughter is living in Canada, and he chats with her almost once every two days over the phone, conversing about essentially everything, to stay close to each other. David rarely contacts his grandson except for urgent matters.
Although David is not experienced with computers, he owns a laptop and is very interested in technology. He often uses his laptop to read Chinese news on the Internet. David would like to connect with his daughter and grandson through video chat, but the following difficulties exist:
David is not familiar with the English alphabet so it is difficult for him to type the address of a website or the login information of MSN or Skype. Furthermore, his eye sight is not very good, so he has difficulty reading tiny text.
David’s daughter finds the setup of internet tasks to be too complicated. Compared to video chatting over the Internet, she finds a phone call to be much simpler and faster.
Currently, the only way David can have his computer set up for video chat is through the help of a friend who is very skilled with computers. However, this friend is not always available. David hopes that, in the future, video chat can be as simple as a phone call.
Lessons learned:
Tyler is an American-born Taiwanese completing his second-year of MBA at MIT. He calls his grandmother in Taiwan on her birthday once a year, usually after a reminder from his mother. To start the call, Tyler signs onto Skype and calls his grandmother’s international number. He uses Skype over other means (such as phone cards) for convenience and low cost; international Skype calls cost two cents per minute.
The birthday call usually lasts a few minutes, during which his grandmother asks him how school is going and also remarks that he should improve his Chinese. The two converse entirely in Mandarin Chinese, which Tyler can only speak at a basic level. Tyler attributes the short duration of the call largely to language barrier, and secondly to the fact that “there isn’t that much to talk about.” Tyler mentions that if it were not for the language barrier, he would like to learn more about what his grandmother “does all day” and hear more updates about his cousins who live with his grandmother. However, he also admits that he calls his grandmother more out of obligation than for chatting purposes.
When asked why he chooses to converse with his grandmother Skype-to-phone rather than Skype-to-Skype, Tyler explained that it would be too cumbersome to call her phone, ask her to sign onto Skype, and wait for her to sign on before finally being able to chat. He added that this certainly would not be worth the very short time (2-3 minutes) that the conversation typically lasts.
Lessons learned:
Nancy is a senior at Princeton, completing her thesis to graduate and go on for a computer science PhD. Naturally, she’s busy all the time, but she would like to keep in touch with her grandparents who have supported her her entire life. Unfortunately, she has run into some obstacles that prevent her from connecting with them more deeply.
Lessons learned:
Rebecca is a junior studying mathematics at MIT. She mostly uses phone to contact her grandmother (hereinafter referred to as Mom-mom, as per Rebecca’s preference). Occasionally she Skypes with Mom-mom and her mother at the same time, because her mom can get the computer set up. Usually Rebecca calls Mom-mom rather than vice versa because Mom-mom worries she might disturb Rebecca during class or sleep hours. Rebecca and Mom-mom talk on weekends mostly.
When Rebecca is at home, she sees Mom-mom all the time because they live close. So when she’s away she still wants to keep in touch with her. She said “We just catch up. There’s really no other purpose but to talk.”
Rebecca hopes that computers could be easier to use so that Mom-mom could use the computer without Rebecca’s mother’s help.
Lessons learned:
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