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Designing an Interactive Application to Promote Healthy Ageing among Older Adults at Home


Thomas Woodruff

28/05/2021

Supervised by Nervo Verdezoto Dias; Moderated by Yukun Lai

Prerequisites: -Basic knowledge of Human-Computer Interaction and user-centered and/or participatory design methods -Experience developing mobile and/or web applications in several platforms (e.g., Android, HTML5 & Javascript, etc.) -Desirable experience with Spanish (not mandatory)

Digital health technologies are becoming increasingly prevalent to support and enhance the everyday experiences of older adults. However, their potential to promote healthy ageing practices has been limited.

The main objectives are: - Make a review of existing technology-enhanced support to promote healthy ageing. - Conduct user studies with older adults and/or family caregivers to gather user requirements and to evaluate the early designs of the application --see below. -Propose, Design and Evaluate an Interactive Prototype (e.g., mobile, web, physical computing, and/or game, etc.) that can promote healthy ageing. Based on the results of the review, the student should propose a specific scenario at the beginning of the project and move between user studies and low-fidelity prototyping to high-fidelity prototyping.

Some examples: Gooch, D., Mehta, V., Price, B., McCormick, C., Bandara, A., Bennaceur, A., ... & Cohen, J. (2020). How are you feeling? Using tangibles to log the emotions of older adults. In Proceedings of the Fourteenth International Conference on Tangible, Embedded, and Embodied Interaction (pp. 31-43).

Sandbulte, J., Tsai, C. H., & Carroll, J. M. (2020). Family’s Health: Opportunities for Non-Collocated Intergenerational Families Collaboration on Healthy Living. International Journal of Human-Computer Studies, 102559.

Sani, Z. H. A., & Petrie, H. (2017). User Evaluation of an App for Liquid Monitoring by Older Adults. In International Conference on Universal Access in Human-Computer Interaction (pp. 86-97). Springer, Cham.

Davidson, J. L., & Jensen, C. (2013). What health topics older adults want to track: a participatory design study. In Proceedings of the 15th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (pp. 1-8).

Takemoto, M., Manini, T. M., Rosenberg, D. E., Lazar, A., Zlatar, Z. Z., Das, S. K., & Kerr, J. (2018). Diet and activity assessments and interventions using technology in older adults. American journal of preventive medicine, 55(4), e105-e115.

Romero, N., Sturm, J., Bekker, T., De Valk, L., & Kruitwagen, S. (2010). Playful persuasion to support older adults’ social and physical activities. Interacting with Computers, 22(6), 485-495.

Petersen, M. G. (2007). Squeeze: designing for playful experiences among co-located people in homes. In CHI'07 extended abstracts on Human factors in computing systems (pp. 2609-2614). ACM.

Aarhus, R., Grönvall, E., Larsen, S. B., & Wollsen, S. (2011). Turning training into play: Embodied gaming, seniors, physical training and motivation. Gerontechnology, 10(2), 110-120.


Initial Plan (08/02/2021) [Zip Archive]

Final Report (28/05/2021) [Zip Archive]

Publication Form