Using attention cards to facilitate active participation in eliciting old adults' requirements for assistive robots

Abstract

Engaging old users in the exploration of future product concepts can be challenging. It is of great value to find ways to actively involve them in the design of novel technologies intended for them, particularly when they have no prior experience of the technology in question. One obstacle in this process is that many old people do not identify themselves as being old or they think that it (the technology) would be good for others but not themselves. This paper presents a card method to overcome this obstacle. A full-day workshop with three internal focus groups was run with 14 participants. Based on our experience, we propose a way in which active participation in the process of eliciting user requirements for assistive robots from old users with no prior experience of assistive robots can be carried out. © 2013 IEEE.