A conceptual approach to enhance the well-being of elderly people

The number of elderly people living alone is increasing. Consequently, a lot of research works have been addressing this issue in order to propose solutions that can enhance the quality of life of elderly people. Most of them have been concerned in dealing with objective issues such as forgetfulness or detecting falls. In this paper, we propose a conceptual approach of a system that intends to enhance the daily sense of user’s well-being. For that, our proposal consists in a system that works as a social network and a smartwatch application that works unobtrusively and collects the user’s physiological data. In addition, we debate how important features such as to detect user’s affective states and to potentiate user’s memory could be implemented. Our study shows that there are still some important limitations which affect the success of applications built in the context of elderly care and which are mostly related with accuracy and usability of this kind of system. However, we believe that with our approach we will be able to address some of those limitations and define a system that can enhance the well-being of elderly people and improve their cognitive capabilities.The work presented in this paper has been developed under the EUREKA - ITEA3 Project PHE (PHE-16040), and by National Funds through FCT (Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia) under the projects UID/EEA/00760/2019 and UID/CEC/00319/2019 and by NORTE-01-0247-FEDER-033275 (AIRDOC - “Aplicação móvel Inteligente para suporte individualizado e monitorização da função e sons Respiratórios de Doentes Obstrutivos Crónicos ”) by NORTE 2020 (Programa Operacional Regional do Norte)

Aestimo: A Tangible Kit to Evaluate Older Adults’ User Experience

Part 1: Accessibility Design PrinciplesInternational audienceSurveys and questionnaires are commonly used to capture people’s experiences with technology. However, some older users experience issues when reading and filling out forms, and inexperienced computer users may not be comfortable with web-based versions. To improve the report of user experience, we designed and implemented Aestimo, a tangible interface based on a shortened version of the AttrakDiff questionnaire. The interface was evaluated during a study with 20 older adults (age avg. = 65.6). Although completing the Aestimo questionnaire took longer than a paper-and-pen version of AttrakDiff, 60% of participants preferred Aestimo over AttrakDiff. Aestimo was found to be innovative and inviting, and to stimulate the senses and the mind. Participants liked feeling guided by the interface, and also found their experience to be playful and fun. Overall, the evaluation of Aestimo was highly positive and suggests that some user groups may benefit from the availability of innovative evaluation experiences

Design Aspects of a Virtual Reality Learning Environment to Assess Knowledge Transfer in Science

Please access the full-text via the Springer.com link at the top of this record.Science educators need assessment tools to assess to what extent learners’ knowledge and skills can be transferred to real-life situations. Virtual reality learning environments (VRLEs) can be used to create authentic virtual spaces where situated learning and assessment can take place. However, there are considerable design and implementation challenges when developing a VRLE. This research explored the design aspects of a virtual reality environment for the assessment of knowledge transfer in science education. A design science research approach was followed, implementing existing guidelines from literature in building a VRLE. Lessons learned from the implementation were formulated, and the theoretical contribution of this study is a set of literaturebased, practice evaluated guidelines, synthesising lessons learned. From the study, it is apparent that there are many benefits from using a VRLE for assessment, and we hope that using these guidelines could mitigate some of the usability issues that remain.School of Computin