Social engagement in elderly care homes: Towards designing an application to reduce social loneliness

Abstract

This paper presents an application that is designed to reduce the loneliness of elderly and to support them in elderly care homes. The social application ‘APPointment’ allows users to plan social activities to undertake with fellows living within a closed community. The app was designed after conducting extensive user research and evaluation sessions with elderly. The results indicate that the target user group found the new app accessible, easy to use and most importantly quite effective in improving their social lives at the elderly care home.