An empirically grounded sociotechnical perspective on designing virtual agents for older adults
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Autonomous, intelligent virtual agents (IVAs) are increasingly used commercially in essential information spaces such as healthcare. Existing IVA research has focused on microscale interaction patterns, for example those related to the usability of artificial intelligence systems. However, the sociotechnical patterns of users’ information practices and their relationship with the design and adoption of IVAs have been largely understudied, especially when it comes to older adults, who stand to benefit greatly from IVAs. Yet, exposing such patterns may more meaningfully relate sociotechnical considerations to users’ perceptions and attitudes toward the adoption of emerging technologies such as IVAs. We explore here the feasibility of information models in informing our understanding of how older adults may use and perceive an IVA. To do this, we relate the insights and findings from a case study of health information IVAs to the six stages of the information search process model (ISP). By doing this, we uncover sociotechnical issues pertinent to each stage of the ISP which help to better contextualize (older) users’ interaction with intelligent interfaces such as IVAs. Through this, we argue for the potential of information models to inform the design of interactive user interfaces from a sociotechnical approach.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it