Older Adult Activity Study

Brief description

To set a price on the value of social inclusion is difficult. Mobility is understood as one of the major prerequisites for social inclusion. For this project, for scenario 1, we investigate off-the-shelf wearable technologies that we hypothesise enable a sense of autonomy and feeling of safety. After a scan of technologies, we will compare Fitbit charge 2 and Garmin vivosmart HR+ for robustness. Both include Fitness/step tracker, Sleep monitor, Heart monitor, Floors climbed and a GPS/Accelerometer. For scenario 2, we collaborate with technology from QUT Computer Human Interaction Lab.The Messaging Kettle: Prototyping Connection over a Distance * for remote awareness, is a Wi-Fi enabled kettle paired with the same set up at a family members home. When a kettle is in use, it lights up at the other pair's home and allows lo-fi messaging between each home, ensuring each home is kept aware of activity. The objective of the overall study is to enable autonomy with mobility and to foster social interaction by providing assistive navigation/activity/at home support to facilitate independence through mobility and/or knowing that others are aware of your activity. Participants do not fulfil specific tasks (exercises, be more active), the study observes changes the assistive technology may enable . We investigate what role assistive technologies can play in facilitating avenues of activity and social inclusion for elders? (e.g. GPS ensures family can find them if they get lost, heart rate means they can see if they are doing too much etc.) Comparatively we investigate what role an awareness technology can play in facilitating feeling safe as an avenues towards social inclusion for elders in their everyday lives? *Aloha Hufana Ambe, Margot Brereton, Alessandro Soro, and Paul Roe. 2017. \Technology Individuation: The Foibles of Augmented Everyday Objects.\ In Proc. 2017 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '17). ACM, New York, NY, USA.