The project discussed in this paper is aimed at increasing people’s understanding of the existence and desired workings of ambient technology in the home by demonstrating its potential. For this purpose, an interactive dollhouse is presented. The dollhouse, a miniature model of a sensor-equipped home, was developed and used to engage elderly users in the design of an ambient monitoring system. This paper explains the design of the interactive dollhouse and the ways it was used as an elderly-centered design method for increasing understanding of the desired workings of ambient monitoring in the home.
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This paper describes the approach used to identify elderly people’s needs and attitudes towards applying ambient sensor systems for monitoring daily activities in the home. As elderly are typically unfamiliar with such ambient technology, interactive tools for explicating sensor monitoring –an interactive dollhouse and iPad applications for displaying live monitored sensor activity data– were developed and used for this study. Furthermore, four studies conducted by occupational therapists with more than 60 elderly participants –including questionnaires (n=41), interviews (n=6), user sessions (n=14) and field studies (n=2)– were conducted. The experiences from these studies suggest that this approach helped to democratically engage the elderly as end-user and identify acceptance issues.
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This paper describes a participatory design-oriented study of an ambient assisted living system for monitoring the daily activities of elderly residents. The work presented addresses these questions 1) What daily activities the elderly participants like to be monitored, 2) With whom they would want to share this monitored data and 3) How a monitoring system for the elderly should be designed. For this purpose, this paper discusses the study results and participatory design techniques used to exemplify and understand desired ambient-assisted living scenarios and information sharing needs. Particularly, an interactive dollhouse is presented as a method for including the elderly in the design and requirements gathering process for residential monitoring. The study results indicate the importance of exemplifying ambient-assisted living scenarios to involve the elderly and so to increase acceptance and utility of such systems. The preliminary studies presented show that the participants were willing to have most of their daily activities monitored. However, they mostly wanted to keep control over their own data and share this information with medical specialists and particularly not with their fellow elderly neighbours.
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