kommTUi: Designing communication for elderly

Abstract

Getting older does not mean being merely excluded from digital worlds. Elderly can at least use the current technology to communicate with their friends and family members without toiling, on contrary with joy and easiness. We know this is not true yet. With our research project kommTUi we do our part to get closer to this goal. In this paper we present our achievement so far. One of the outcomes is our approach to better design usable and user-sensitive interaction for elderly. We further show how four design workshops, carried out in two years, and tangible user interfaces we developed so far can generate and support playful environments with elderly. We finish our paper with the presentation of the final model of the new devices we are currently developing in our project. © 2012 Springer-Verlag.