Engaging Senior Adults with Technology for Behavior Change

Abstract

Amidst today’s ever-expanding waistlines there is a clear need to investigate technology’s potential to support behavior change and stimulate increased physical activity. Physical activity has also been shown to increase the independence and well-being of older adults, yet an important segment of this community is often excluded from the necessary in-context research due to the barriers they face to technology acceptance. Currently, there is limited knowledge on how to overcome these barriers to participation. We created a specific Product Service System that supports older adults to engage with the proposed technological interventions to enable important in-context behavior change research. Our approach converges knowledge from the domains of living laboratories, co-design, and existing experience of design research with older adults. From our experiences with this Product Service System, we provide guidelines to support other researchers setting-up a living laboratory study with older adults to explore technology’s potential to motivate behavior change.