Mobile application for digital capacity assessment

Age is currently used as the sole or primary index of digital skills, categorizing smartphone users into two main groups: digital immigrants (DI), born before the 1980s, and digital natives (DN), born from the 1980s onwards. This distinction arises from the fact that DN, unlike DI, experienced the advent of smartphones during their youth, benefiting from the brain’s plasticity in early developmental years, which makes acquiring new sensorimotor skills easier and more effective. However, while age plays a fundamental role in learning, it is reductive to consider it as the only determining factor. All generational cohorts who encountered smartphones learned to use them at different stages in their lives, with learning rates shaped by factors such as frequency of use, prior computer skills, and personal predispositions. To delve deeper into these dynamics, we developed an Android app and a keyboard, integrating them into an experimental pipeline consisting of four tasks (two writing tasks and two related to photo and gallery management) to collect data from smartphone users. Preliminary analyses focusing on task execution, conducted on data collected from 80 subjects, show that DN complete task with a higher average gesture speed than DI. However, some DI achieve performances comparable to those of DN, and vice versa. A regression analysis revealed a continuous relationship between age and digital skill, suggesting a more nuanced distribution of abilities across individuals. These findings indicate that further investigations, focused on gesture execution or the subject’s history and lifestyle, could lead to the definition of a digital skill index with a more heterogeneous distribution among users compared to a simple binary classification based on age.