Culture, as an intangible piece of heritage, is one of the priorities of sustainable conservation. With the rapid modernization of science and technology, traditional culture that is expressed in the form of sound is facing prominent problems related to inheritance and development. Thinking about how to integrate traditional culture into the daily life of the public is an important way of solving sustainability problems related to traditional culture. This study took Guqin culture as its research object, explored the possibility of using sound as an interactive medium, and considered how to present traditional culture to the public in public space to broaden the inheritance and development mode of Guqin culture. Therefore, this study proposes a public Sound Interaction Design Model oriented to sound and presents a public sound-interactive installation with different levels based on the model. The feasibility of the model is verified through an interactive design evaluation method, and the role of the model in sustainable cultural development is discussed.

To improve older adults’ mental health, this study compared the effects of AI chatbots, such as ChatGPT 3.0, with traditional mindfulness therapies on loneliness and depression in older adults. Despite interest in AI as a complementary tool, empirical evidence on its impact remains limited. For an eight-week intervention, older adult participants from two nursing homes in Hangzhou were assigned to groups focused on mindfulness (group sessions) and chatting (one-on-one ChatGPT). Following the intervention, participants engaged in a researcher-led focus group discussion. After 8 weeks, tension had decreased significantly (p < 0.05) in the Mindfulness group of older adults, and there was no significant difference between the effects of ChatGPT and mindfulness on the emotional intervention of older adults. Findings indicated three themes, including (1) personal experience, reflecting older adults’ use of AI technology and mindfulness; (2) attitudes and perspectives on the experiment’s desirability and insufficiencies; and (3) needs and expectations for future AI and mindfulness developments, including usability and functional preferences. Similar to mindfulness practice, ChatGPT interactions helped older adults feel less depressed and might eventually reduce costs by replacing mindfulness. In the future, AI can be integrated with conventional techniques to improve interaction by giving AI a more human-like appearance.

As a result of aging populations globally, a growing number of older adults prefer to age in place; therefore, it is essential to study the spatial adaptability of the house. This study aimed to explore the relationship between the efficiency of daily activities and the spatial layout of home kitchens in the elderly population, and to assess the moderating role of cognitive function. Twenty-one elderly participants completed the experiment, including non-cognitively impaired (n = 12) and cognitively impaired groups (n = 9). Their home kitchen space was partitioned in plan and elevation based on space syntax theory. They were required to complete three tasks (i.e., an easy task, a medium task, and a difficult task) in their respective kitchens. The relationship between the efficiency of different tasks’ completion and the corresponding kitchen space attributes (integration, mean depth) was examined. The results showed a significant association between the home kitchen space layout of homebound older adults and their kitchen activity efficiency. In addition, a positive moderating effect of cognitive ability was found in the association between moderate and difficult tasks (p < 0.05), and its effect appeared to be stronger under challenging tasks (p < 0.01). The results of this study may help provide a basis for future design and optimization of aging-friendly residential spaces.

The study verified the role that different interface designs and users’ educational backgrounds play in the task performance and subjective evaluation of mobile terminal customization system. Interface type (based on scroll, alternative, and attribute) and user group (college students and industrial workers) were employed as the variables. A total of 72 users were included in the study, and an analysis of 3 × 2 between-participants design indicated that (1) Different interface designs of customization systems had a significant difference in task performance, the alternative based interface had the best results in the task performance, and there was no significant difference between the attribute-based and scroll-based interfaces in task performance; (2) The matching between educational background and interface type will affect the users’ evaluation on system usability. Industrial workers thought that the scroll-based and alternative-based interfaces were more useable, while college students preferred attribute-based interface design; (3) Different interfaces had a significant difference in user task load. The scroll-based interface had the lowest mental demand on the users, while alternative-based had the lowest physical demand on the users, though it consumed more effort; (4) Different educational backgrounds had a significant difference in user task load. Industrial workers showed lower effort in the scroll-based and alternative-based interfaces, while college students had lower effort in the attribution-based interface; (5) A correlation analysis showed that there was a significant negative correlation between the system usability score and the effort in task load. This study results have a positive significance for interface design. With educational background and layout as two important factors in our interface design, we may obtain the most appropriate design principles for enhancing the online customization experiences of different groups of consumers. The more important is that this study is based on the actual needs of the industry. For the first time, we take suitcase as an online customized product, which may not only help local manufacturers to extend their traditional offline distribution channels to online, but also provide a constructive thinking concerning interface design for customization of a single product.

Existing motion capture technology can efficiently track whole-body motion and be applied to many areas of the body. This whole-body interaction design has gained the attention of many researchers. However, few scholars have studied its suitability for elderly users. We were interested in exercise-based whole-body interactive games, which can provide mental and physical exercise for elderly users. We used heuristic evaluation to measure participants’ actions during exergame tasks and analyzed preference differences between elderly and younger users through the distribution of actions in four dimensions. We found that age affected the actions performed by users in exergame tasks. We discuss the mental model of elderly users during the process of performing these tasks and put forward some suggestions for interactive actions. This model and these suggestions theoretically have guiding significance for the research and application of exergame design for elderly users and may help designers develop more effective exergames or other whole-body interaction interfaces suitable for elderly users.

With the rapid graying of China’s population, ensuring and improving the quality of life for Chinese elderly people has become an urgent issue. This paper explores the needs of elderly people in China from the perspective of their caregivers by applying machine learning approach upon social media posts related to elderly care and subsequently put forward strategies with respect to data mining findings. We obtain more than thirty thousand texts from the Douban discussion group named “One-Child Parent Retirement Exchange”; Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) model is employed to extract topic and words, to analyze and categorize text into relevant elderly care. This study then utilizes SnowNLP module upon previous outcome to appraise the emotional bias of the caregivers. Our finding points out that the essential needs of Chinese elderly people are mental health needs, information needs and intergenerational needs; the emotional bias of children in supporting their parents was generally negative. At the end, our paper subsequently suggests strategies to satisfy the primary elderly caring needs while at the same time alleviating caregivers’ pressure.