Comparison of Burden on Youth in Communicating with Elderly using Images Versus Photographs

Conversation is a good preventative against behavioral problems in the elderly. However, caregivers are usually very busy tending to patients and lack the time to communicate extensively with them. Toward overcoming such problems actively listening volunteers have more opportunities to communicate with the elderly, but the number of skilled volunteers is limited. Therefore, we investigated conversational support systems for inexperienced volunteers; such systems usually include content such as photographs, videos, and music. We expected that the volunteers would feel less stress when using videos instead of photographs for conversational support because the former provided both volunteers and patients with richer information than the latter. On the other hand, photographs gave patients more chances to talk with volunteers. However, there has been no research to date on the effect of content type upon stress and conversational quality. In this paper, we compared using photographs with using video from such viewpoints.