Digital caretaker for elderly


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Creator/Artist: Dhananjay Wagh

Category: Product Design

Document: P3 Project

Batch: 2001-2003

Source: India,   IDC IIT Bombay

Period:  1999-2008

Medium: Report pdf

Supervisor: Prof. Vijay P. Bapat & Prof. Anirudha joshi


Detailed Description

The project deals with conceptualising and designing an electronic product to take care of elderly people’s health-related problems. The aim was to design a device for the elderly that will act as a digital caretaker and help them to solve some of their health-related problems based on physiological and psychological requirements. There are many problems everybody comes across in old age, like health problems, communication problems, entertainment problems, relationship problems, memory problems, economical problems, and time management problems. These problems arise due to changes in the human body, physiological functions, motor ability, and sensory and mental changes in old age. The first step was to understand all the above problems of elderly people and then select the important one. A user survey study was done with 20 elderly targeted users to understand the requirement of the product. The survey was based on contextual enquiries, which helped to understand the real problem faced by elderly people. The data was derived with the help of consolidation of work models and affinity diagrams. This gave us the list of problems, which were carefully segregated into two parts: a) problems that can be handled by design and b) problems that cannot be handled by design.