From close the door to do not click and back. Security by design for older adults

TL;DR

This paper explores safety challenges faced by older adults using mobile technology, analyzing a case study to propose design improvements that enhance their online and real-life safety.

Contribution

It presents a case study linking online and real-life safety issues for older adults and offers design suggestions to improve application safety for this demographic.

Findings

Identified safety risks for older adults using mobile apps

Linked online threats to real-life safety concerns

Proposed design guidelines for safer applications

Abstract

With the growing number of older adults who adopt mobile technology in their life, a new form of challenge faces both them, as well as the software engineering communities. This challenge is the issue of safety, not only in the context of risk older adults already face on-line, but also, due to the mobile nature of the used applications, real life safety issues raising from the use of on-line solutions. In this paper, we wish to use a case study they conducted in order to address this issue of interrelating on-line and real life threats. We describe how the observation from the case study relate to the collected body off knowledge in the relevant topic, as well as propose a set of suggestion for improving the design of applications in regards to addressing the issue of older adults safety.