Stakeholders in Smart City Living Lab Processes

Due to the increasing urbanization around the world, cities are growing at fast pace and following that, many cities face problems that includes both hard and soft issues. This can for instance be transportation, energy suppliance, social inclusion and quality of life for its citizens. As a way to contribute to solving these problems the smart city concept has emerged. This concept is focusing on capitalizing on ICT landscape in a strategic way. To achieve a smart city it is important to start with understanding the people and their needs which can be supported by a Living Lab. These Living Lab involve a multitude of stakeholders in their innovation processes and thus, it becomes important to understand the power dependencies, claims and roles these stakeholders have. Thus, the aim of this paper is to explores the stakeholders that are involved in smart city innovation processes supported by Living La

A Model for Reflective Participatory Design - The Role of Participation, Voice and Space

This paper aims to contribute to the participatory tradition in health informatics by presenting a model for reflective participatory design emerging from qualitative fieldwork in a participatory project aimed to improve the health and wellbeing of older people in the northern periphery regions of Europe, through new mobile services. The model brings together two established processes in novel ways: systems development and user participation. Within each process three concepts are presented to facilitate discussion and reflection at the concept level, the process level and the integrated process level

COGKNOW: Development of an ICT Device to Support People with Dementia

Objective: To develop a successful user-validated cognitive prosthetic device with associated services to help persons with mild dementia. Setting: The ICT solution will be developed by a consortium of eleven institutes in eight countries in Europe. It will be tested and evaluated by users (persons with dementia and their carers) in 3 European cities - Amsterdam, Belfast and Luleå. Methods: To identify and analyse the needs of persons with dementia, workshops and interviews were conducted with Alzheimer patients suffering from mild dementia, and their carers in three European cities. A literature search was also performed to identify existing proven effective ICT solutions for persons with dementia. Results: The most important needs and the most preferred ICT solutions identified by participants were (i) Activity reminders e.g. for eating meals; (ii) Item locators; (iii) Picture dialling to keep in contact with family and friends; (iv) Support for pleasure activities; (v) Enhancement of feelings of safety. Conclusion: Based on the needs identified, a prototype solution will be built, tested and modified as an iterative process. The device will ultimately be evaluated to see if it can enhance feelings of autonomy and quality of life of persons with dementia

How to Sustain User Engagement over Time: A Research Agenda

User participation in the Information Systems (IS) user studies has become a popular and widely studied research topic. Understanding of how users should be involved in the projects and how to deal with the various challenges of involving users is important. Keeping users motivated over the time is one of the biggest challenges in the process of user involvement. As the first step of research on how to build a sustained user engagement, the aim of this study is to identify, categorize and sum up existing research on why people drop-out of user studies before the project or activity has ended. The main findings of our study indicate that the performance of the prototype, user selection, user preparation, interaction with the users, privacy concerns and scheduling are highly influential on this issue. Based on the findings, this study also proposes a research agenda to guide future studies in this area