Exploring Older Adults' Attitudes Towards Privacy of Adaptive Assistive Technologies

Abstract

Adaptive assistive technologies can support the accessibility needs of individuals whose abilities vary due to a diagnosis, medication, or other external factors by monitoring and adapting to their fluctuating performance. As these systems offer many compelling benefits to users, the privacy threats posed by these systems have been largely overlooked in Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) literature. This work identifies potential privacy threats posed by adaptive assistive technologies, and investigates the privacy-related perspectives and concerns of older adults who experience varied pointing abilities, in the context of these systems. In our first study, we conducted eight interviews with older adults diagnosed with Essential Tremors. Six months later, six of our participants partook in novel participatory privacy elicitation activities in the second study. We found that participants had positive attitudes towards assistive technologies that gather their personal data, but also had strong preferences for how their data should be used and who should have access to it. We identify a need to factor in privacy threats when designing assistive technologies to avoid exposing users to these hazards. We conclude with design recommendations to offer users more agency over their collected data from these systems.