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The care potential at the local community has become increasingly important given growth of the elderly population and the escalating cost of public health care. CommunityNet aims to bring together family and friends in a community system while lowering the barrier towards asking for help. A user-centered design process was followed to find a product concept which appeals to the target user group and which addresses the user needs. The concept was evaluated in a field test, which showed success in lowering the barrier towards asking multiple contacts for support. Participants indicated that they preferred using CommunityNet compared to face-to-face contact and telephone when support is not urgent. Since participants indicated problems building their network, the next step will be to integrate an automated mach-maker facility.

This report presents an awareness display for supporting family carers of independently living seniors. The focus was on providing awareness and promoting peace of mind. It was developed as part of a graduation project. In a literature research, family care, context awareness systems and state of the art were studied. User research was conducted to further explore the user context and the awareness needs of the family carers. The results of the literature research and user research were used to design a concept of the Family Care Book. In a field study, the final design was tested with end-users, in order to determine if the Family Care Book is able to support the family carer’s awareness and provide peace of mind. The increase of senior citizens will put pressure on the professional care system since the number of people providing the care is expected to stay the same. Senior citizens often prefer to live independently in a familiar setting. The trend of seniors living independently is recognized and supported by the government. Senior citizens living on their own can help lower the pressure on the care system. Aging often makes it harder for senior citizens to complete normal daily activities. Therefore it is very important for an independently living senior citizen in the need of a support to have a good supporting net. The family carers, the friends and family, often play an important role especially when a support starts to be needed. Family carers need to be aware of the senior citizens situation in order to provide care in the right way and pick up on changes in the situation. It often is difficult for family carers to be aware which causes them to worry about the senior. Often a balance needs to be found between the senior citizen’s desire to live independently in a familiar setting versus the need for a safe living situation. Awareness systems are considered a promising means to support independently living seniors and their caregivers. Currently there are remote monitoring products to capture everyday routines. However acceptance issues arise since the current options do not fit the need and pose a tension between privacy and independence. The results of the literature research confirmed context awareness systems as a promising means to support independently living seniors and their caregivers. The challenge is thus to design a device that incorporates contextawareness technology and fits the need of the family carer and is accepted by both the family carer and the senior. Literature suggested that when seniors notice the benefits of a technology, they are more likely to accept this technology. In an operational research conducted among 8 target users, the needs and wishes of this group were examined. This research provided insight into the lives and worries of the family carers. The research consisted of a contextmapping study and semi-structured interviews. The information need as described by literature and the user research are consistent. The user research confirmed that worries can cover all levels of human needs identified by Maslow. However the awareness displays developed in previous researches never provided awareness of all 5 levels of human needs. Often only the bottom two needs are monitored. The contextmapping study shows awareness is also wanted on all levels of human needs. The exact information can cover all human needs. Based on the literature research, research with the family carers, the awareness needed of the seniors situation to promote peace of mind and how to present the information was determined. The awareness needs included a combination of monitoring sensor data and communication. This combination provides a broader look on the situation and includes the senior in the system. Based on the awareness needs and findings from the user research and related work a final design was developed. The final design is named the Family Care Book. A journal metaphor is used to convey the information to the user. The interaction is based on the personal interest social intimates have for each other and the worries connected to an aging senior. The Family care book does not only tell the family carer when things are going wrong, but also shows when things are going right. The Family Care Book gives an overview of the senior citizens day. Sensors are used to provide a view on the senior’s day and indicate when it is going considerably different from normal. Communication through messages is used to share experiences, messages and feelings. In order to verify if the application reached its goal, a prototype was built and tested. The prototype was developed to enable the basic functionalities needed to test if the Family Care Book could help provide awareness and support peace of mind. A field test was conducted with two couples consisting of a family carer and the independently living senior they cared for. The family carer was given an iPhone and the senior had a touch screen in her home with the Family Care Book application. Unfortunately the validation of the test results is limited. In the first test the participants close living distance made the need for awareness support very low. During the second test many problems occurred with conveying the sensor information. The two participant couples involved in the field test confirmed the possible usefulness of the concept. - the Family Care Book is appreciated by the current family carers - the Family Care Book contributes to the family carer’s awareness - the Family Care Book will strengthen peace of mind. At the same time it is important to keep in mind that it has little value when there is a small distance between the carer and the carer receiver. Secondly basic computer skills are needed to be capable of using the Family Care Book. A larger-scale user study with a better functioning prototype is needed in order to collect significant results, these preliminary findings do suggest that the approach taken in terms of a portable awareness display which allows sharing practical information with social communication seems promising.

Due to the demographic shift and aging population, the number of the seniors with cognitive impairments is increasing. In taking care of these seniors, caregivers experience both financial and emotional burdens. This project studies three care parties of this special group of people, who take care of the seniors with a mild cognitive impairment (MCI) in home settings at an early stage of disease, including case managers, home nurses and family caregivers. Main goal of this project is to design a tool to improve the communication and collaboration between them. The insights of how caregivers experience the MCI was gained through three steps of researches: literature research, field research and in-depth research. The field research is extensively carried out in different care settings to get to know the care system and involved people. And in-depth research is further studied the needs and wishes of people in experiencing MCI. Through visiting and interviewing a lot of people, I found the three care parties are differently involved in the cooperative work. Their needs and preferences have much variation in coping with caregiving. The shared information among them is divided into common information and non-common information. To satisfied all the three parties needs as much as possible, the design starts from solving the problem in the current situation: caregivers have miscommunication in informing caregiving activities and updating senior’s conditions using notebook. The design challenge is: To better support the communication and collaboration between caregivers by using an engaging tool. Three features are set as the design visions: in-control, friendly and connected. After exploring four design directions, I found it is crucial to develop a solution that provides immediate benefit to all stakeholders, the design direction focusing on the common information requirements is selected as the start of the design. With the information framework, the interface development was started by placing the information components of the main interface. The chosen idea is with no particular emphasis on certain information, which applies for three care parties. Following the design visions, the visualization of the final interfaces was discussed to achieve the design challenge of making it easy to use and elaborated eventually. The final design is elaborated into a prototype made by power point and tested with seven users of both professional caregivers and family caregivers. Generally they like the concept and the design. Also gives suggestions in terms of several aspects of design and information customize. Due to time constraints, only three points on the main interface, history interface and settings are refined. And the other suggestions are left for recommendation for the further study.

This report describes the process of the graduation project of Xu Chen. The project was carried out for Philips Consumer Lifestyle Netherlands on TA2 project and under supervision of the Faculty of Industrial Design Engineering at the Delft University of Technology. TA2, Together Anytime, Together Anywhere, is a large integrated multimedia project funded by European Union FP7. The main task of this graduation project is to look into the human factors in ambient intelligence, namely strategic design for “Connected Lobby” on how to enhance family “togetherness” while taking into account of people’s privacy. This thesis focused especially on investigating on the possibility of balancing “togetherness” and “privacy” through computer-mediated communication. A new design approach was explored in the project to guide the strategic product planning process from expressing user’s latent experience by combining semantic differential scaling (SDS) experiment into user research. A context model was generated, providing the possibility of balancing “togetherness” and “privacy” through three factors in seven different usage contexts. A design part followed the exploratory phase. A strategic design guideline on control scheme, namely how to use ambient awareness system to trigger people to communicate was generated. The concept of “smart awareness assistant” was developed and a renewed “Connected Lobby” interface was designed and tested. The “smart awareness assistant” could trigger the family members to share the meaningful moment with each other at the right time, and filter the unwanted information exchange when the user is not available to communicate, which could enhance family “togetherness” through balancing “awareness” and “privacy”.

This report is about a graduation project on lighting experience design for urban middle class Chinese homes, which is done for Philips Consumer Luminaires (Shenzhen) Co.,Ltd. The project aims to develop a lighting solution that meets the latent desires and needs of urban middle class Chinese families in the living room. The user centered research and design approaches such as “Contextmapping” were applied during the process. Through the literature research and the company research, the strength and weakness of current home lighting solutions were identified. After that, the explorative user research was carried out to find out what needs and wishes they had when using light at home. During the session, the current problems and needs were asked. Light intensity and light color temperature are concluded to be the most important parameters that people want to adjust with limited amount of luminaires they have when it comes to ambience settings. They also have desires to have more advanced way of control like using certain sensors. Lacking of local light source for ambience or reading is another significant issue for daily use. Moreover, they have their own contemporary style and more and more emotional and rational needs in life. In addition, urban middle class Chinese family desire to be surrounded by natural things at home such as plants, flowers, scenes of sky and stars on the ceiling etc. since they live in the concrete cities. A baseline study was also conducted with the existing lighting control system in the company to identify the benefits and problems. Followed by the research findings, an interaction vision was generated from a brainstorm session. The vision is enable luminaires to act or co-response with each other and people as “soul mates”. Five ideas came up afterwards with the interaction quality. Three concepts from an abstract level were formulated based on the ideas. The final concept was to control all the lights from one luminaire that users can reach easily. Then all the functions that required from the users together with the insights on existing system were considered to be involved to the design development. The whole consideration during the design process was around how to apply the functions to the contemporary form factors of the luminaire. The system and control interface worked well in the final design. Due to the prototype was not complete with system embedded; further evaluations on the design are needed in the future to find out whether the design meets the needs of urban middle class Chinese families. From the user tests that were already done among the three families, users seem to focus more on the aspects of control than the function of illumination. So more tests are needed to define the position of the product next. The participants indicated that the system was intuitive to use. Generally the evaluation shows that the concept is appreciated by the participants. Therefore, it is a good start for Philips to develop lighting control in the future.

The aim of this project was to create a toolkit that can be used to develop engaging new products and services aimed at senior users. This toolkit consists of elements from games which succeed in motivating seniors, related to the context of the project. According to application designers, the two key aspects that can be improved in their design process are communication and inspiration. Communication relates to design experts discussing product- or service ideas with their clients or members of a multi-disciplinary team. Inspiration relates to providing individuals or groups with little to no knowledge of how games are built a starting point from which they can start to think, as well as providing structure for design teams so that they do not lose focus while brainstorming. The end result of this project is an infographic, in which barriers and opportunities of the target group are linked to a selection of game elements. This infographic, the BOE-model (Barrier, Opportunity and Element-model), can be used by application designers aiming to design engaging products and services aimed at seniors and has been successfully tested in terms of communication and inspiration.

The advent of context-aware technology enables new possibilities to stimulate physical exercise aimed at preventing age-related disabilities amongst an increasing elderly population. This study presents an innovative attempt to encourage seniors to walk by making them aware of their current physical activity levels. Our approach comprises an ubiquitous system that deploys a collection of persuasive principles within a user-friendly environment for the elderly. We focus on the iterative design process in which experts and potential users collaborated to produce a prototype that was tested in the field during two 11-day interventions. The insights gained throughout the design process and the exploratory evaluation are presented as a reference for future designs involving Persuasive Technology in preventive healthcare solutions.