ElderBench: Benchmarking Autonomous Mobile Agents for Older Adults

Abstract

While autonomous mobile agents hold great potential for assisting older adults with smartphone usage, existing GUI benchmarks mainly rely on explicit, goal-oriented instructions and rarely capture the naturally occurring language patterns of older users, such as indirect speech, referential ambiguity, and under-specified requests. This mismatch between benchmark instructions and real-world elderly interactions may hinder reliable agent deployment. To address this gap, we present ElderBench, the first benchmark for evaluating mobile GUI agents in authentic elderly-oriented scenarios. ElderBench is constructed from 249 naturally elicited smartphone tasks collected from older adults across 20 applications. We first characterize the linguistic divergence between elderly instructions and existing GUI benchmark instructions from syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic perspectives. We then evaluate mainstream GUI agents and Vision-Language Models under both online and offline settings, revealing substantial performance degradation when handling elderly-oriented instructions. Through controlled instruction normalization, failure analysis, and fine-grained linguistic feature analysis, we further identify how elderly-specific language patterns contribute to agent failures. Our findings provide actionable design insights toward more adaptive, interpretable, and age-inclusive GUI agents for older adults.