The design of a Behavioural changing technology,studied to motivate elderly and raise awareness towards the often undervalued dehydration problem that affects most of the elderly.
5 month.
Individual Project
A Big problem for seniors health, even if widely inderestimated, is HYDERATION. It is one of the ten most frequent causes for elderly hospitalization. The challenge is to increase awareness and give them motivation over hydration problem with behavioural changing technologies for elderly.
The design of a behavioural changing technology, studied to motivate elderly and raise awareness towards the often undervalued dehydration problem, that affects most of the seniors and causes serious health damages.
Causes : thirst is not always a reliable sign of water need, because often when seniors experience thirst it’s already late. The sense of thirst tends to decrease with age, while the amount of needed fluids grows.
Symptoms : Dehydration symptoms are often non-specific, so more difficult to detect. Mild ones can include dryness in the mouth, fre- quent headaches, general weakness or feeling of being unwell, sleepiness or irritability, higher tendency to fall, memory loss. More serious symptoms are low blood pressure, convulsions, muscle cramping, wrinkled skin, rapid but weak pulse.
Once defined the importance of the problem, we explored the user journey of the action of drinking a glass of water, analyzing a generic senior living home alone, to understand the main problems and the opportunities on which the project could be built. The final map was framed based on five different user journeys of seniors with mobility impairments, swallowing problems, memory loss, incontinence or living alone.
To understand which direction to take to improve HydroPal, the whole structure was splitted in categories, each one with op- tions, and some users were asked to express their preferences about them (board.3 - Card sorting results). The participants of the card sorting were five elderly between 65 and 80 years old.
