Designing for older people: A case study in a retirement home

Abstract

This paper discusses the design process of a system aiming to support daily life of older people in a retirement home. This system called Sammy was designed on a participatory basis by a multidisciplinary team. The main results are the importance of communicating with all the stakeholders regarding both strengths and weaknesses of the new system, the importance of the social factors in system acceptance, the need to combine various evaluation methods during the design process, the importance of contextual factors and the need to take into account the dynamics of population in a retirement home. © 2010 Springer-Verlag.