Understanding the Questions Asked by Care Staff While Eliciting Life Stories from Older Adults for AAC System Design

Several augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) systems have been developed to present multimedia content to support the storytelling of older adults. To develop these systems, the AAC system designer requires information regarding the interaction of conversations in the field. Designing such systems requires careful consideration of not only the provision of content as stimulus for older adults but also the support for interlocutors to ask effective questions within the frequent sequential patterns. However, the efficacy of questions asked by interlocutors while presenting content has not been a major focus of research. This paper presents an analysis of peer conversations between geriatric health service facility residents with neurocognitive disorders and their care staff, while photographs are being shown on a touchscreen. As a result, we determined the questions and patterns that are effective in eliciting storytelling. These insights may be used to enhance the design of AAC systems for storytelling.