Abstract
Aging populations are increasing globally, impacting community mobility (CM), an important factor for older adults’ (OA) quality of life. Taiwan, facing transportation challenges and complexity in its transition to a super-aged society (by 2025), highlights the importance of supporting OA's CM. While autonomous vehicles (AVs) promise potential benefits for OAs, current technologies often are not designed with OAs’ needs and visions. We conducted contextual inquiry interviews with 18 participants (mostly OAs) to understand their current transportation challenges and their imaginations for an AV-enabled future. Thematic analysis identified five themes for current challenges, and five themes for future imaginations. Six design recommendations were proposed, underscoring: (1) social user research, (2) mixed-mode travels, (3) autonomous parking, (4) space customizability and shape transformability, (5) user experience for autonomous connectedness, and (6) regulatory improvements. This study, as one of the early works for studying AV in a super-aged society, offers region-specific insights that welcome commonalities and contrasts from the international research community.
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Acknowledgements
We thank for the support from “Healthy Longevity Global Grand Challenge (HLGC)”, which was internationally initiated and organized by USA’s NAM (National Academy of Medicine), with local funding provided and managed by Taiwan’s Academia Sinica (grant number AS-HLGC-111-07). We also thank the participants for their time and the valuable input.
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Chang, J.SK. et al. (2024). Designing Autonomous Vehicle Interactions for a Super-Aged Society: A Formative Study. In: Gao, Q., Zhou, J. (eds) Human Aspects of IT for the Aged Population. HCII 2024. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 14726. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-61546-7_10
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