PeerRadio & PeerLight: Designing IOT Technologies To Support Elderly People in Experiencing Social Moments from Home

Some elderly people with deteriorating abilities who receive home care service and do not use new technologies miss social content in their everyday lives. As part of this UX research project, I explored the role technology can play for these home care receivers in experiencing culture and how social interaction with peers from the same urban neighborhood can be embedded in this cultural experience. Based on my findings, I defined culture as brief special moments in everyday life that positively change the perception of a day.

Using findings from fieldwork and literature-focused research, I developed two scenario-based service designs, PeerRadio and PeerLight, with the aim to create these moments at home in elderly people’s everyday lives.

PeerRadio is a radio program for home care receivers from the same neighborhood that sends contributions produced by the elderly people and provides them with a reason to talk to each other. PeerLight is a connected lamp that makes the user’s activity visible at a peer’s home, and vice versa, thereby supporting the ability to care for each other. With the aid of scenarios and personas, I explored how these services could be integrated in the daily lives of different types of home care receivers and how they should be developed further in future works.

This project demonstrates my ability to listen to people and understand their situation, but to also scope challenges in co-design processes and adapt my UX research methods to the situation and people.