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Essay on Identifying Elderly People's Needs

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Identifying elderly people's needs for communication and mobility Sauli Tiitta HIIT (Helsinki Institute for Information Technology), Finland sauli.tiitta@hiit.fi Keywords Elderly people; communication; mobility; participatory observation; narratives, user needs; security and group coherence. Abstract The Finnish parliament's future commission has listed challenges in elderly peoples lives that could be overcome using new technology. The two most important inhibiting factors affecting the quality of life of elderly people were identified as solitude and immobility (O Kuusi, 2001). The purpose of this research is to identify everyday motivational needs concerning communication and mobility of elderly people and present a …show more content…

• Technological solutions should contribute in travelling outside home and daily activities at home and near home. The commission has stated that solitude and immobility are the most important shortcomings that technology should attempt to alleviate (O Kuusi, 2001). Here are examples to show that researchers have started to see the importance of social and mobility needs. The importance of elderly people's social, emotional and environmental factor needs have been found in recent researches (J abascal, 2001; KZ Haigh, J Phelps and CW Geib, 2002; T Hirsch et al., 2000 and JA Jore, 2001). They argued that designing eldercare technologies to address all these factors lowers social barriers. Nokia Mobile Phones and Work Science Laboratory in Oulu, Finland found out that the most beneficial services for elderly in the future are those by which they can maintain their social relationships, health and ability to live at home. Various telemedical, security and alarm system services will be important (M Mikkonen, S Väyrynen, V Ikonen, MO and Heikkilä, 2002). It has been said that elderly are not interested in technology and don't want to use it at all. The elderly have adopted technical systems slower than others. Also interfaces haven't been designed for them with small buttons or

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