Co-designing smart home technology with people with dementia or Parkinson's disease

Involving users is crucial to designing technology successfully, especially for vulnerable users in health and social care, yet detailed descriptions and critical reflections on the co-design process, techniques and methods are rare. This paper introduces the PERCEPT (PERrsona-CEntred Participatory Technology) approach for the co-design process and we analyse and discuss the lessons learned for each step in this process. We applied PERCEPT in a project to develop a smart home toolset that will allow a person living with early stage dementia or Parkinson's to plan, monitor and self-manage his or her life and well-being more effectively. We present a set of personas which were co-created with people and applied throughout the project in the co-design process. The approach presented in this paper will enable researchers and designers to better engage with target user groups in co-design and point to considerations to be made at each step for vulnerable users

Collective attention and active consumer participation in community energy systems

Community energy systems, which rely on demand-side self-organisation of energy distribution, can encounter situations in which demand exceeds supply, and unless the community members schedule energy usage by and between themselves, there will be a blackout. This is effectively a collective action dilemma typically modelled as a repeated game and analysed using Game Theory. In this paper, we investigate the situation from an empirical (rather than analytic) perspective using instead a Serious Game. Motivated firstly by Elinor Ostrom's institutional design principles for sustainable common-pool resource management, and secondly by the idea that collective attention is a prerequisite for successful collective action, we present the design and implementation of a Serious Game which both encapsulates (some of) the design principles and promotes collective attention within the game's interface, affordances and interactions. Our experimental results show that as more interface design features which promote collective attention are enabled, then more often successful collective action is observed. These results have, we argue, important implications for Smart Meter design and roll-out programmes, as well as leveraging the active participation of prosumers in innovative operational and management principles for future Smart Grids

Co-Created Personas: Engaging and Empowering Users with Diverse Needs Within the Design Process

Personas are powerful tools for designing technology and envisioning its usage. They are widely used to imagine archetypal users around whom to orient design work. We have been exploring co-created personas as a technique to use in co-design with users who have diverse needs. Our vision was that this would broaden the demographic and liberate co-designers of their personal relationship with a health condition. This paper reports three studies where we investigated using co-created personas with people who had Parkinson’s disease, dementia or aphasia. Observational data of co-design sessions were collected and analysed. Findings revealed that the co-created personas encouraged users with diverse needs to engage with co-designing. Importantly, they also aforded additional benefts including empowering users within a more accessible design process. Refecting on the outcomes from the diferent user groups, we conclude with a discussion of the potential for co-created personas to be applied more broadly

Social Mpower: An Educational Game for Energy Efficiency

A number of serious games have been developed for energy systems that act as an educational tool and help energy consumers to better understand concepts such as resource allocation, electricity prices and grid sustainability. In such gamified environments, players use technology to solve environmental problems including greener environment, optimised energy and water infrastructure, sustainable resources and reduced energy use. Social Mpower game is a representation of an autonomous energy community for local power generation and distribution in which the participants have to avoid a collective blackout by individually reducing their energy consumption by synchronising and coordinating their actions. Our experimental hypothesis is that collective awareness can be enhanced by appropriate features of the game interface, and therefore to increase the opportunities and prospects for successful collective action (e.g to avoid a blackout)

A collective adaptive socio-technical system for remote- and self-supervised exercise in the treatment of intermittent claudication

Vascular surgeons have recognised that the condition of many patients presenting with intermittent claudication and peripheral arterial disease is better treated by physical exercise rather than endovascular or surgical intervention. Such exercise causes pain, though, before and until the health improvements are realised. Therefore, patients experiencing pain tend to stop doing that which causes it, unless they are supervised performing the necessary exercise programmes. However, supervised exercise is an extremely costly and time-consuming use of medical resources. To overcome this series of problems, we propose to develop and deploy a healthcare application which provides patient exercise programmes that are both centrally organised and remotely supervised by a health practitioner, and self-organized and self-supervised by the patients themselves. This demands that two dimensions of adaptation should be addressed: adaptation prompted by the health practitioner as the patient group improves and meets programme targets; and adaptation prompted from within the patient group enabling them to manage their own community effectively and sustainably. This position paper explores this application from the perspective of engineering a collective adaptive system for a mobile healthcare application, providing both remote- and self-supervised exercise. This requires, on the one hand, converging recent technological advances in sensors and mobile devices, audio and video connectivity, and social computing; with, on the other hand, innovative value-sensitive and user-centric design methodologies, together with formal methods for interaction and interface design and specification. The ultimate ambition is to create a ‘win-win-win’ situation in which the benefits of exercise as a treatment, the reduced costs of supervision, and the pro-social incentives to perform the exercise are all derived from computer-supported self-organised collective action