Digital Touchpoints: Generating Synthetic Data for Elderly Smartphone Interactions

Bilal Maqbool, Sebastian Herold

2025

Abstract

Context: Ensuring smartphone interfaces are usable and accessible is essential for elderly users, particularly those with motor impairments, who face challenges with touchscreen interactions. Problem: Hand tremors and limited motor control can hinder touchscreen accuracy and efficiency. Meanwhile, recruiting elderly participants for usability studies can be challenging, often resulting in limited interaction data. Objectives: This study aimed to investigate elderly users’ smartphone interaction patterns, identify key challenges, and generate synthetic data to address data scarcity for usability research. Method: A custom-designed mobile app collected interaction data from 51 elderly participants performing tapping, dragging, and tracing tasks. Hand steadiness was assessed using accelerometer data. Gaussian Process Regression (GPR) and Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) models were used to generate synthetic datasets replicating user interaction patterns. Results: Users with shaky hands struggled with precision tasks, especially involving smaller GUI elements, while larger elements improved performance. Continuous control was also found to be challenging in tracing tasks. Synthetic datasets successfully replicated spatial, temporal, and distributional metrics, demonstrating potential utility in future usability evaluation research. Conclusions: Inclusive GUI designs and adaptive features can improve accessibility for the elderly with limited motor control. Synthetic data can offer a potential solution for further usability evaluation research in building AI-driven design evaluation tools, reducing reliance on resource-intensive participant recruitment in earlier prototypes. Future work should examine diverse tasks and scenarios and involve people with severe motor impairments.

Paper Citation

in Harvard Style

Maqbool B. and Herold S. (2025). Digital Touchpoints: Generating Synthetic Data for Elderly Smartphone Interactions. In Proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Information and Communication Technologies for Ageing Well and e-Health - Volume 1: ICT4AWE; ISBN 978-989-758-743-6, SciTePress, pages 126-140. DOI: 10.5220/0013439200003938

in Bibtex Style

@conference{ict4awe25,
author={Bilal Maqbool and Sebastian Herold},
title={Digital Touchpoints: Generating Synthetic Data for Elderly Smartphone Interactions},
booktitle={Proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Information and Communication Technologies for Ageing Well and e-Health - Volume 1: ICT4AWE},
year={2025},
pages={126-140},
publisher={SciTePress},
organization={INSTICC},
doi={10.5220/0013439200003938},
isbn={978-989-758-743-6},
}

in EndNote Style

TY - CONF

JO - Proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Information and Communication Technologies for Ageing Well and e-Health - Volume 1: ICT4AWE
TI - Digital Touchpoints: Generating Synthetic Data for Elderly Smartphone Interactions
SN - 978-989-758-743-6
AU - Maqbool B.
AU - Herold S.
PY - 2025
SP - 126
EP - 140
DO - 10.5220/0013439200003938
PB - SciTePress