The Effect of Cognitive Load on Gesture Acceptability of Older Adults in Mobile Application

The use of gesture to interact with technology is widely gaining the popularity since they are not only easy to use but also easy to learn and remember. Moreover, gestures are very natural since they are used by human in their day to day life to communicate and interact with each other. Hence those gesture does not put greater cognitive load on human mind. The cognitive capabilities of older adult are less than of younger adults as older adults have low learnability and memorability. To carter this problem we have analyzed the impact of gesture usage on the cognitive load of older adults and how this cognitive affect the acceptability of those gestures. In addition to this, we have compared different types of gestures to understand which gestures are more accepted by the older adult. The types of gestures included were single finger gesture, multiple finger gesture, bimanual gesture, metaphoric gesture, complex gesture and simple gestures. To compare the usability, affordance, acceptability and cognitive load of these gesture we have developed seven hypotheses. After operationalizing the variable of these hypothesis, the experiment was conducted on the older adults. The results of experiment showed that gestures which are mapped to a metaphor had low cognitive load as compare to gesture that are not mapped. Moreover, the results also showed that performance of single figure gesture was better than multiple finger gesture. However, one handed gesture does not have better performance than bimanual gesture. Finally results showed that gestures with higher cognitive load have low acceptability rate among the older adults.