Wearing Trust: How Older Adults Calibrate Reliance on Health Wearables Through Bodily Experience and Everyday Use

2026-08-09

AI Summary

This study addresses the challenge older adults face in assessing the reliability of health wearable outputs, as the critical attributes underpinning trust are often invisible to them. Through semi-structured interviews and thematic analysis with 31 older adults in China, the research reveals that users primarily rely on brand reputation, price, interface feedback, bodily sensations, and prior usage experience to construct trust. The work introduces the concept of an “observability gap” to articulate the misalignment between user-derived trust cues and the system’s actual reliability. Building on this insight, it proposes four design directions: enhancing transparency of signal quality, strengthening contextual expressions of reliability, optimizing human-device alignment mechanisms, and supporting traceability of alerts. These contributions offer both theoretical grounding and practical guidance for designing trustworthy health wearables tailored to older populations.

Abstract

Older adults increasingly use health wearables, yet often cannot inspect the properties that matter for reliance. Through 31 semi-structured interviews in China, we examined how participants judged whether wearable outputs were reliable enough for everyday use. Participants relied on brand and price, visible interface activity, lived interaction experience, and comparison with bodily sensation. These cues supported conditional trust, but did not reveal sensor validity, data continuity, or failure conditions. We describe this mismatch as an observability gap and outline design directions for showing signal quality, reliability by context, human-system fit, and alert provenance.

Problem

• health wearables
• older adults
• trust calibration
• observability gap
• reliance

Innovation

• observability gap
• health wearables
• older adults
• conditional trust
• reliability calibration