ICT-Enabled Communication Tools for the Elderly: A Proximity-Based Social Communication Tool

ICT and Communication

The term communication derives from the Latin verb communicare that originally means “to share”, that is, sharing thoughts, opinions, experiences, feelings, and emotions with others. Communication is not simply talking; it necessarily concerns an interpersonal relation and exchange. Inter-personal communication involves two or more persons and is always based on a relation in which interlocutors influence each other, even if they do not notice that consciously. Inter-personal communication can be categorized into: verbal, non-verbal, and para-verbal communication. Verbal communication indicates what you say/write and concerns the usage of language (either spoken or written) and depends on syntactic and grammatical rules. Non-verbal communication concerns other channels of communication like facial expression, look, gestures, body posture, gait, and clothing. Para-verbal communication indicates how you say/write. It mainly concerns voice (tone, volume, rhythm) and includes pause, laughter, silence and other vocal expressions.

Information and communication technology has enabled some new forms of human communication and has changed the previous ones in different ways. ICT-enabled communication has had its own evolution from the early days up to now. The evolutionary path of inter-personal communication starts with simple one-to-one text-based messaging systems, gets richer with one-to-many messaging as well as going towards multimedia messages comprising images, voice, and video, and finally peaks with complex social communities with high dynamics and complex social interactions and functionalities.