What is it about?
This paper is about creating a better way to design cybersecurity education for older adults from Indigenous and culturally and linguistically diverse (CALD) communities. Many existing online safety materials assume English fluency and Western learning styles, which can make them less effective or less trustworthy for people from different cultural backgrounds. The paper proposes a methodological framework that combines community co-design, participatory workshops, and Ambient Intelligence (AmI) to build systems that can adapt to users’ language, literacy, and cultural context. The aim is to make online safety guidance more understandable, more respectful, and more relevant to the real experiences of older adults in diverse communities.
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Why is it important?
This work is important because older adults in Indigenous and CALD communities can face higher exposure to online scams, phishing, misinformation, and identity theft, yet many current cybersecurity training approaches are not designed with their needs in mind. The paper is timely because it brings together cultural adaptation, human-centred AI, and cybersecurity education in a way that goes beyond simple interface translation. It highlights the need for systems that are not only technically adaptive, but also culturally safe, transparent, and community-driven. That matters for digital inclusion, because trust and accessibility are essential if people are to benefit from online services without being pushed further to the margins. The framework is also valuable because it offers a practical pathway that researchers, educators, and community organisations can adapt in other settings.
Perspectives
What I find especially meaningful about this work is that it treats cybersecurity not just as a technical problem, but as a human, cultural, and ethical one. People are more likely to engage with digital safety tools when those tools reflect their language, values, and lived experiences. I think this paper is important because it pushes HCI and AI design toward a more inclusive direction, where communities are not just users but active co-designers. The focus on Indigenous knowledge, participatory design, and interpretable AI makes the work especially relevant in a time when many technologies are becoming more powerful but not always more equitable. I hope this framework helps inspire more culturally grounded digital-safety research and more trustworthy systems for communities that have too often been overlooked.
Dr Quazi Mamun
Charles Sturt University
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Methodological Framework for Co-designing Culturally Adaptive Ambient Intelligence Systems for Cybersecurity Education in Indigenous and CALD Older Adult Communities, January 2026, Springer Science + Business Media,
DOI: 10.1007/978-3-032-29723-5_1.
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