Design Challenges for Reconnecting in Later Life: A Qualitative Study

Friendships and social interactions are renown contributors to wellbeing. As such, keeping a healthy amount of relationships becomes very important as people age and the size of their social network tends to decrease. In this paper, we take a step back and explore reconnection —find out about or re-contact old friends, an emerging topic due to the increased use of computer-mediated technology by older adults to maintain friendships and form new ones. We report on our findings from semi-structured interviews with 28 individuals from Costa Rica and Poland. The interviews aimed to explore whether there is a wish to reconnect, and the challenges encountered by older adults to reconnect. We contribute with design considerations for tools allowing older adults to reconnect, discussing opportunities for technologyEU Horizon2020 research and innovation programme under the MarieSkłodowska-Curie grant agreement No 690962.UCR::Vicerrectoría de Investigación::Unidades de Investigación::Ciencias de la Salud::Instituto de Investigaciones en Salud (INISA