“Do What I Say”: Designing a Voice Assistant to Help Train Older Adults in Product Assembly

Voice assistants (VAs) may provide useful assembly instruction, but little work has explored their use with older adults for this purpose. In a qualitative field study with six older adults, requirements for assembly instruction and voice or VA technology design were gathered, leading to initial insights about component identification, verification, readability, sociability, and dialog content. Results informed the design of a VA (“Build2Race”) to aid an older adult assembly task. A usability and feasibility evaluation of the VA was then carried out with three young adults to ensure that the VA provided good general user experience as a first step towards implementing the VA with older adults. The requirements and prototype design presented in this paper should provide useful design guidance for researchers interested in assembly or instructional tasks for older adults.