Contact activity visualization for seniors

Abstract

Over the years, people raise their children and watch them as they make their adult lives away from home. Because of that, seniors lose contact and intimacy with their loved ones, as physical presence isn’t as possible as desirable. Also, because of physical impairments that may arrive as years pass by, seniors may experience difficulties in communicating and interacting. Thus, a research project called PAELife (Personal Assistant for the Elderly Life) was created with the aim of fighting isolation and exclusion. Our personal contribution to this project is displaying the most active contacts in a visual, powerful way so that they notice which friends are contacting them more and which ones don’t contact in a long time. To achieve that, we built a set of prototypes that display contacts’ activity from different sources (email, social networks, etc.) and performed two user tests, in order to identify the best alternatives and understand if the senior citizens can correctly perceive the contacts’ activity. The tests’ feedback allowed us to know what prototypes to choose and the ones to discard. After analyzing the results we implemented a final functional prototype that matched all the requirements collected from the users.