2018 Volume 20 Issue 2 Pages 163-172
In recent years, long-term, continuous distant-care has been drawing an attention to maintain elderly persons' healthy life expectancy. And under such circumstances, a novel approach of distant-care system has been proposed, in which the elderly persons are represented by an avatar, protecting their privacy. In this paper, we empirically examine the technology acceptance of an avatar-mediated distant-care system in elderly persons. The study employs one-factor (avatar-mediated distant-care system vs. image based distant-care system) with-in participant design and evaluate by using a questionnaire. We had 34 participants and an average age of participants was 70.4. As the results of experiment, participants rated that the avatar-mediated distant-care system was less discomfort, have less risk of privacy violation, and more likable than the image based distant-care system. We conclude, from above results, that the avatarmediated distant-care system had advantageous properties in technology acceptance for elderly persons than the image based distant-care system.
