  The elderly often struggle when interacting with technologies. This is
because the software and hardware components of the technologies are not
familiar to the elderly's mental model. This is a lack of empirical studies
about how the concept of familiarity can be infused into the design of
interactive technology systems to bridge the digital divide preventing today's
elderly people from actively engaging with such technologies. In this paper, a
multi pronged approach is utilized. We investigate the Effects of Familiarity
in Design on the Adoption of Wellness Games by the Elderly, familiarity in
productive ageing, familiarity in efficient collaborative crowdsourcing,
productive ageing through familiarity based Intelligent Personalized
Crowdsourcing and familiarity based Agent Augmented Inter-generational
Crowdsourcing. The results show that familiarity in design improves the
perceived satisfaction and adoption likelihood significantly among the elderly
users. These results can potentially benefit intelligent interface agent design
when such agents need to interact with elderly users. A Crowdsourcing
algorithm, CrowdAsm is developed. By using CrowdAsm we are able to dynamically
assemble teams of workers considering the budgets, the availability of workers
with the required skills and their track records to complete crowdsourcing
tasks requiring collaboration among workers with heterogeneous skills.
Theoretical analysis has shown that CrowdAsm can achieve close to optimal
profit for a collaborative crowdsourcing system if workers follow the
recommendations.
