How can design and technology help elderly living in a carehome improve social connection with other people?

Uitkijkpost is a platform designed to enrich social connections between elderly people and people from local neighbourhoods through a real-time view-sharing experience. It is a PhD research carried out by Xu Lin from the research group Designed Intelligence of the faculty Industrial Design Tu/E.

We do research with elderly to see how design and technology can help improve their social connection with other people, such as their families, caregivers, volunteers, people from local neighbourhoods and so on. We perform interviews and co-design studies together with the elderly people, and design interactive products and installations to enrich their experience in social interaction in daily life.

As the PhD student isn’t a native Dutch speaker and the elderly aren’t native English speakers, my role is to assist in this. I’m responsible for facilitating interviews and co-design sessions, transcribe, translate and analyse these into insights for the research. Besides this, I deliver feedback in the set-up and design of the studies.