The Lighthouse - Concept for Assisting the Elderly Community
In this project, our team - Gil Zablodovsky, Yulia Litvinov and me, designed a concept of service for the elderly community during our M-design program at HIT.
We started by researching and collecting data.
First, we met with an expert on social services and public infrastructure for senior citizens who explained to us about the multifactorial problems elderly encounter. We met elderly people in the City of Holon, visited and interviewed them at their homes and observed them in the city's parks and centers.
Our findings were that many old people experience loneliness (24% women & 11% men) and 25% find it hard to perform daily activities. They suffer from many issues that contribute to their social isolation, some are obvious - becoming weak, the death of a spouse and leaving the workplace, less consumption of goods, less income, deterioration in physical and cognitive capabilities. But we also found that some problems are connected to the city, like the distance from the home to transportation and holes in the pavements and low numbers of benches to rest, as they quickly become tired.
We decided to develop a concept aiming at improving the quality of life of elderly people, by encouraging them to be active, get out of their homes and meet people.
It was evident that the elderly feel insecure and will need some kind of escorting facilitated technologically and humanly.
We chose two metaphors inspiring us that provide security.
The first one was the police box, a place in the city providing security and help to the citizens.
The second metaphor was the lighthouse, helping ships navigate at night and navigate safely.
The project name we chose was "Lighthouse"
and it's logo combines the two metaphors:
At some point, we thought of a kind of kiosk situated in parks and other points of interest for the elderly. Here are some sketches while I played around with that idea:
While the kiosk at the POI (point of interest) may serve as a modern version of the police box, it requires many instances of it spread all around, high maintenance and does not solve the problem of getting from the house to the first stop.
Therefore we came with a mobile-based solution consisting of 3 main elements.
- The elderly use a smartwatch to invite assistance. Some will use the app if they are ok with using a smartphone.
- A pool of volunteers (Students and employees screened by their HR department) using their smartphone to on board to the system and get calls.
- A call & control center coordinates between the elderly and volunteer.
App
for
Volunteer &
Elderly
Call Center
for
Matching &
Supervising
Smartwatch
for
Elderly
Wireframes of the mobile and smartwatch appa:
On boarding
One can sign up as a participant or volunteer
Here are the storyboard and the resulting movie
to communicate the concept's typical scenario:
