Jenny Waycott

Jenny Waycott
University of Melbourne | MSD · Department of Computing and Information Systems

PhD

About

156
Publications
55,340
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6,287
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Publications

Publications (156)
Article
Full-text available
Background MATCH (Music Attuned Technology – Care via eHealth) is a music and health application that supports caregivers of people living with dementia to use music strategically to better manage care through virtual training and intuitive music technology. This study trialled a prototype version of the MATCH app with family caregivers and people...
Article
Full-text available
Background MATCH (Music Attuned Technology – Care via eHealth) is a music and health application that supports caregivers of people living with dementia to use music strategically to better manage care through virtual training and intuitive music technology. This study trialled a prototype version of the MATCH app with family caregivers and people...
Article
Full-text available
Video calls are increasingly being adopted to enable older adults living in long-term residential care (aged care homes) to remain socially connected with friends and family. However, care home residents often require extensive support to participate effectively in video calls. Despite growing interest in examining the work involved in facilitating...
Preprint
Full-text available
UNSTRUCTURED Music has long been identified as a nonpharmacological tool that can provide benefits for people with dementia, and there is considerable interest in designing technologies to support the use of music in dementia care. However, to ensure that music technologies are appropriately designed for supporting caregivers and people living with...
Article
Full-text available
Background Music has long been identified as a nonpharmacological tool that can provide benefits for people with dementia, and there is considerable interest in designing technologies to support the use of music in dementia care. However, to ensure that music technologies are appropriately designed for supporting caregivers and people living with d...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
Community-based social programs, such as interest groups and outings, provide valuable ways for older adults to maintain social connectedness. To understand how technology can be designed to support older adults in such programs, we conducted a four-month field study with a local community centre, involving: (1) observations of social program sessi...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
Recent innovations in digital technology offer significant opportunities for older adults to engage in meaningful activities. To investigate older adults' perceptions of using existing and emerging technologies for meaningful activities, we conducted three participatory design workshops and follow-up interviews with adults aged over 65. The worksho...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
Family caregivers of people living with dementia need easy-to-access strategies to manage changing care needs. Music therapy is valuable for supporting dementia care, but not always accessible. Technologies could potentially facilitate accessible, home-based music therapy support, but need to be carefully evaluated. We conducted an 8-week field tri...
Preprint
BACKGROUND Music has long been identified as a nonpharmacological tool that can provide benefits for people with dementia, and there is considerable interest in designing technologies to support the use of music in dementia care. However, to ensure that music technologies are appropriately designed for supporting caregivers and people living with d...
Article
Full-text available
Social programs run by community organizations provide an important outlet for social connectedness among older adults. However, these programs were disrupted by the COVID-19 pandemic restrictions. In this study, we aimed to understand how community organizations used digital technologies to continue running social programs online for older adults...
Article
Objectives Virtual reality (VR) is not a common leisure activity in aged care, despite pilot studies demonstrating its value as a tool to combat inactivity and loneliness. This study investigated the organisational enablers and barriers to sustained uptake of VR among aged care staff and organisations, who may lack familiarity or confidence with th...
Article
Full-text available
With interest growing in social robots for older people, it is crucial to consider how robots can be designed to support wellbeing and ethical values in residential aged care. By applying Tronto’s ethics of care framework and the Care Centred Value-Sensitive Design methodology to existing literature, this paper investigates how caring values are ex...
Article
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Background: Lockdowns have been employed to prevent the spread of transmissible illnesses such as influenza, norovirus, and COVID-19 in care homes. However, lockdowns deny care home residents supplemental care and socioemotional enrichment that comes from seeing family members. Video calling has the potential to enable ongoing contact between resi...
Article
Full-text available
Background Music therapy is increasingly recognized as an effective support for people living with dementia. However, with incidences of dementia increasing, and limited availability of music therapists, there is a need for affordable and accessible ways that caregivers can learn to use music-therapy based strategies to support the people they care...
Conference Paper
Technology can be valuable for providing social and emotional enrichment for people living in residential aged care, but its use is difficult to sustain because of the complexity of the aged care environment. This paper aims to advance understanding of care environments to inform the sensitive design of technologies for social benefit in those sett...
Article
Full-text available
Background: Many older adults now use technologies such as wearable devices and telehealth services to support their health and well-being while living independently at home. However, older adults vary in how they use these technologies, and there is a lack of knowledge regarding the motivations that influence their acceptance and use of health-re...
Article
Social robots have the potential to augment the care provided to older adults in residential aged care homes. However, social robots can only be valuable in aged care if care staff successfully incorporate them into their ongoing care practices beyond a limited research period. This study examines the benefits and challenges of using different type...
Article
Full-text available
Restrictions arising from the COVID-19 pandemic have limited opportunities for older people to participate in face-to-face organised social activities. Many organisations moved these activities online, but little is known about older adults' experiences of participating in those activities. This paper reports an investigation of older adults' exper...
Preprint
BACKGROUND Many older adults now use technologies such as wearable devices and telehealth services to support their health and well-being while living independently at home. However, older adults vary in how they use these technologies, and there is a lack of knowledge regarding the motivations that influence their acceptance and use of health-rela...
Preprint
BACKGROUND The COVID-19 pandemic prevented family members from visiting their relatives in aged care due to lockdowns and social distancing. Because of this situation, many people became reliant on video calls to see their relatives living in care. However, video calls can be considered by some as being a poor substitute for in-person visits, and t...
Article
Full-text available
The paper, ‘“Who Wants to Know all this Stuff?!”: Understanding Older Adults’ Privacy Concerns in Aged Care Monitoring Devices’, by Sami Alkhatib, Ryan Kelly, Jenny Waycott, George Buchanan, Marthie Grobler and Shuo Wang, published in Interacting with Computers (November 2021), explores the use of care technology and the privacy concerns of older p...
Conference Paper
Videoconferencing has been increasingly used for social connectedness in residential aged care (RAC). In sensitive settings such as RAC, it is important that technologies are introduced with careful consideration of people's needs and experiences with the technology, to ensure that the desired benefits are realised. This paper reviews research evid...
Article
Full-text available
Aged care monitoring devices (ACMDs) enable older adults to live independently at home. But to do so, ACMDs collect and share older adults’ personal information with others, potentially raising privacy concerns. This paper presents a detailed account of the different privacy problems in ACMDs that concern older adults. We report findings from inter...
Article
This article discusses sociotechnical challenges of technology-based interventions to address loneliness in later life. We bring together participatory and multidisciplinary research conducted in Canada and Australia to explore the limits of digital technologies to help tackle loneliness among frail older people (aged 65+). Drawing on three case st...
Article
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Including older adults as full stakeholders in digital society.
Article
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Background: Digital technologies such as virtual reality, humanoid robots and digital companion pets have the potential to provide social and emotional enrichment for people living in aged care. However, there is currently limited knowledge about how technologies are being used to provide enrichment, what benefits they provide, and what challenges...
Preprint
BACKGROUND Digital technologies such as virtual reality (VR), humanoid robots, and digital companion pets have the potential to provide social and emotional enrichment for people living in aged care. However, there is currently limited knowledge about how technologies are being used to provide enrichment, what benefits they provide, and what challe...
Article
Full-text available
As people move into advanced old age, they may experience cognitive impairments and frailty, making it difficult for them to live without support from others. Caregivers might decide to use aged care monitoring devices (ACMDs) to support older adults under their care. However, these devices raise privacy concerns as they collect and share sensitive...
Conference Paper
Despite there being evident benefits of using virtual reality (VR) in aged care, it is not yet widely used in residential aged care homes. One factor that may contribute to this is the willingness of staff to use VR as part of the social program offered in aged care homes. Therefore, we need to understand staff perceptions of VR programs, especiall...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
Due to the evolving nature of technology and its impact on individuals, communities and society, practitioners and designers in Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) are expected to consider ethics in their work. This role has inspired the development of a number of resources for practice, such as tools, frameworks and methods to tackle ethical issues i...
Preprint
Research into companion robots for older adults, including those who are socially isolated and lonely, continues to grow. Although some insight into older adults' preferences for various robotic types and functionality is emerging, we lack research examining how these robots fulfil or challenge a range of values and aspirations individuals have in...
Article
Full-text available
In virtual environments, spatial information is communicated visually. This prevents people with visual impairment (PVI) from accessing such spaces. In this article, we investigate whether echolocation could be used as a tool to convey spatial information by answering the following research questions: What features of virtual space can be perceived...
Article
Objective: Digital technologies can support reminiscence and lifestyle enrichment in residential aged care. This study explores potential benefits and risks of virtual visits using digital maps, tablet computers and virtual reality technologies. Methods: Reminiscence sessions were conducted with metropolitan aged care facility residents (n = 7),...
Article
Full-text available
Social virtual reality (social VR) is an emerging technology that has the potential to support unique social experiences for groups of older adults. In this paper we explore the use of social VR to support group reminiscence, an activity that has been shown to have a positive impact on the lives of older adults. We developed School Days, a bespoke...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
While VR has shown benefits such as improving alertness, recalling memories and cognitive training for older adults, it is challenging to deploy it in aged care settings due to the complexity of social care, physical and healthcare needs of the residents. This paper presents a two-phase study that aims to explore the challenges of deploying VR tech...
Conference Paper
Modern society is characterized by the use of information and communication technologies. Older adults are believed to face challenges while learning to use new technologies but there is very limited understanding of what those challenges are or how they should be overcome. In this paper, we present findings from a literature review of 22 articles...
Conference Paper
Human-computer interaction researchers have explored how to design technologies to support people with dementia (PwD) and their caregivers, but limited attention has been given to how to facilitate music therapy in dementia care. The use of music to help manage the symptoms of dementia is often guided by a music therapist who adapts the interventio...
Conference Paper
Virtual Reality (VR) has been increasingly used for enrichment in later life. This review aims to investigate what is currently known about this topic. Following the PRISMA guidelines, fifteen articles were included for in-depth review. The review indicates that this topic is being explored by researchers in multiple disciplines. The VR systems in...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
Virtual Reality (VR) has been increasingly adopted by residential aged care facilities (RACFs) for enriching residents' experiences. RACFs are sensitive settings with complex sociocultural elements, thus aged care providers might experience challenges when introducing new technologies. This paper presents findings from a descriptive analysis of sur...
Article
Full-text available
The Montréal Declaration for Responsible Development of Artificial Intelligence states that emerging technologies ought not “encourage cruel behaviour towards robots that take on the appearance of human beings or animals and act in a similar fashion.” The idea of a causal link between cruelty and kindness to artificial and living beings, human or a...
Article
Full-text available
A large body of research demonstrates the positive impact that reminiscence activities can have on older adult wellbeing. Within this space, researchers have begun to explore how virtual reality (VR) technology might be used as a reminiscence tool. The immersive characteristics of VR could aid reminiscence by giving the sense of being fully present...
Article
Full-text available
A growing body of research is examining the way that virtual reality (VR) technology might enrich the lives of older adults. However, no studies have yet examined how this technology---combining head mounted displays, motion tracking, avatars, and virtual environments---might contribute to older adult wellbeing by facilitating greater social partic...
Article
Background and objectives As technologies gain traction within the aged care community, better understanding their impact becomes vital. This paper reports on a study that explored the deployment of virtual reality (VR) as a tool to engage older adults in Residential Aged Care Facilities (RACF). The paper has two aims: 1) to identify the benefits a...
Article
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"Aging in place" refers to older adults remaining in their home as they age to maintain their independence and attachment with their community. The preference to "age in place" has led to increasing use of aged care monitoring devices to monitor the health, safety and wellbeing of older adults while living alone in their home. However, these device...
Conference Paper
There is growing interest in technologies that allow older adults to socialise across geographic boundaries. An emerging technology in this space is social virtual reality (VR). In this paper we report on a series of participatory design workshops that involved extended in-depth collaboration with 22 older adults (aged 70-81), that aimed to underst...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
Previous research on games for people with visual impairment (PVI) has focused on co-designing or evaluating specific games - mostly under controlled conditions. In this research, we follow a game-agnostic, "in-the-wild" approach, investigating the habits, opinions and concerns of PVI regarding digital games. To explore these issues, we conducted a...
Conference Paper
Despite improvements in the accessibility of digital technologies and growing numbers of tools designed specifically for older adults, adoption of such tools remains low for this demographic. This workshop aims to explore the contextual factors that contribute to reduced uptake among older adults in order to understand how to design digital technol...
Conference Paper
We are witnessing an increase in fieldwork within the field of HCI, particularly involving marginalized or under-represented populations. This has posed ethical challenges for researchers during such field studies, with "ethical traps" not always identified during planning stages. This is often aggravated by the inconsistent policy guidelines, trai...
Conference Paper
An ongoing challenge within the diverse HCI and social computing research communities is understanding research ethics in the face of evolving technology and methods. Building upon successful town hall meetings at CHI 2018, GROUP 2018 and CSCW 2018, this panel will be structured to facilitate audience discussion and to collect input about current c...
Article
Full-text available
The proliferation of digital data and internet-based research technologies is transforming the research landscape, and researchers and research ethics communities are struggling to respond to the ethical issues being raised. This paper discusses the findings from a collaborative project that explored emerging ethical issues associated with the expa...
Chapter
Aged care providers and researchers are increasingly exploring the use of communication technologies to help older people remain connected to the world as they age. These initiatives often aim to counteract the negative effects of social isolation, thereby aiming to compensate for deficiencies associated with old age, rather than aiming to build on...
Chapter
Participatory research methods are increasingly being adopted when designing and evaluating emerging technologies for older adults. This chapter details our approach to applying participatory methods to our work with a group of older adults during series of workshops. The workshops involved working with 25 adults from both regional and metropolitan...
Chapter
Full-text available
In this chapter, we reflect on our experiences of designing and evaluating new technologies with older adults. We describe encounters from two projects that have prompted us to reconsider our research in two ways. First, we highlight ethical tensions: situations where we have had to adapt our research approach to account for unexpected ethical chal...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
The graphics-intensive nature of most virtual environments (VEs) prevents many people with visual impairment from being able to successfully explore them. A percentage of the population of people with visual impairment are known to use echolocation -sound waves and their reflections- to better explore their surroundings. In this paper, we describe...
Conference Paper
Residential aged care facilities (RACFs) provide full-time, permanent care for older adults who are no longer able to live at home independently. In these facilities, new technology such as tablets, virtual reality, and social robots are increasingly being deployed with the aim of providing engaging and fun activities for residents. Although HCI re...
Conference Paper
There are many barriers to employment for people with visual impairments. Assistive technologies (ATs), such as computer screen readers and enlarging software, are commonly used to help overcome employment barriers and enable people with visual impairments to contribute to, and participate in, the workforce. However, recent research suggests it can...
Conference Paper
Robot pets are being developed and deployed to provide companionship for older adults. While robot pets offer some therapeutic benefits, their intended use for 'companionship' often provokes ethical debate, including concern that interactions with robot pets are demeaning or lack value compared to other social interactions. Another concern is that...
Article
Posttraumatic growth (PTG) is emerging in the published literature as an important aspect of postdisaster recovery. Despite these research insights into the positive transformations that people experience, PTG has not been formally operationalised in postdisaster psychosocial recovery efforts. This paper presents findings from a mixed methods study...
Article
Objectives There are growing concerns that social isolation presents risks to older people's health and well‐being. Thus, the objective of the review was to explore how technology is currently being utilised to combat social isolation and increase social participation, hence improving social outcomes for older people. Methods A systematic review o...
Conference Paper
Older adults are increasingly engaging in online activities, including games, with other people. Many online environments require the user to create some form of self-representation, ranging from a simple user name through to a full body avatar. These self-representations not only enable access to online activities, but also provide an opportunity...
Conference Paper
Virtual reality (VR) is now being designed and deployed in diverse sensitive settings, especially for therapeutic purposes. For example, VR experiences are used for diversional therapy in aged care and as therapy for people living with conditions such as phobias and post-traumatic stress. While these uses of VR offer great promise, they also presen...
Article
Despite sociological attempts to critically address an age-based digital divide, older adults (65+) continue to be portrayed in the academic literature and public discourse as a homogeneous group characterised by technophobia, digital illiteracy, and technology non-use. Additionally, the role of socioeconomic factors and personal contexts in later...
Article
Full-text available
The rapid increase in the number of older adults in developed countries has raised concerns about their well-being and increasing need for healthcare. New technologies, including Internet of Things, are being used to monitor older adults' health and activities, thus enabling them to live safely and independently at home as they age. However, Intern...
Conference Paper
Virtual Avatars can bring opportunities for enjoyment, social participation and exploration of identities. However, the configuration of avatar creation software may marginalise some groups of users due to them reinforcing social stereotypes that privilege youth and beauty, rather than representing the broader variety of human identities. Older adu...
Article
It has become commonplace in higher education for instructors to use social technologies to motivate and challenge their students and to support learning objectives. In some instances, social technologies are used to make students' assessable work visible to other people, such as peers and external audiences. This study investigates university stud...
Conference Paper
This pictorial aims to demonstrate the power of video for fostering creative personal storytelling among people who normally have limited opportunities to share their experiences. We discuss two video stories, created in collaboration with participants in a project that aimed to enable housebound people to share their stories within the local commu...
Conference Paper
As interactive technologies evolve and reach into every aspect of modern life, research practices in human-computer interaction (HCI) have changed. The methodological and epistemological foundations of the field are shifting to reflect the diversity of contexts in which rapidly changing digital technology is being used. Alongside these changes, new...