Context and Challenge

According to the CDC, each year, one in three older adults aged 65 and older experiences a fall, and people who fall once are two to three times more likely to fall again. These injuries are treated in an emergency department every 13 seconds and claim a life every 20 minutes.

The client's brief challenged our team to make it easy to gain insight into seniors’ safety and ongoing health needs on a daily basis. We set out to design an Apple Watch and iPhone experience that accommodates the needs of the aging population and those who care about them.

Our hypothesis was that aging-in-place seniors need assistance from caregivers in order to live on their own but they want to maintain their independence.

We set out the following learning objectives for our research:

• Elderly Tech Adoption and Usage: How do seniors adopt and use technology?
• Accessibility: How is technology made accessible to seniors?
• Health and Safety Devices: What health and safety devices do seniors use?
• Falls and Fall Prevention: What safety concerns do seniors have and what do they do in the case of a fall?
• Role of the Caregiver: What concerns do caregivers have and what is their role in the health and safety of seniors?
• Aging in Place: What are the advantages and challenges of living independently?
• Medication Habits and Adherence: How do seniors manage medications?

Themes arose in our research that crystallized into design principles that could serve as a guide for how to design.

Accurate and Reliable: The peace of mind a support system gives depends upon the perceived accuracy and reliability of the support system.

Adaptable: Seniors need different kinds of support and it evolves over time.

Self-Awareness: Seniors constantly assess what may no longer be safe for them to do so they can ask for help (or explain that they don’t need help.)

Choice: Seniors are looking for support but not required support. Seniors want to maintain a sense of choice and independence.

Learnable: Seniors want to use modern technology but need a scaffolded way to learn how to use it.

Accessible: Aging effects hearing, eyesight, and dexterity as well as memory, attention, and decision-making.

Invisible: Seniors want support that is unobtrusive and embedded naturally in objects or activities of daily life.

Honor Active Mind: Remaining cognitively sharp and curious is important to seniors especially as their physical abilities might change.

We jumped into the ideation process by holding a team design studio. We quickly moved into paper prototyping driven by our scenarios.

Focused on 3 scenarios: Request emergency assistance for a fall emergency, request emergency assistance for a non-fall emergency, and responding to medication reminders.

Rapidly iterated based on feedback: We developed and implemented a plan for usability testing based on our scenarios.

Researched technical constraints: I had to immerse myself in the Apple Watch human interface guidelines in order to understand the limitations on voice control, launching apps, and phone calls.

With the Vytality iOS App, caregivers are able to monitor for emergencies related to falls and medical adherence. With the Vytality Apple Watch App, seniors are able to live independently but reach out for the support they want when they need it.

Along with high-fidelity prototypes, we developed a product road map that laid out how the PeakFoqus experience could evolve over time to become the most optimal experience for users and what the client would need to do as next steps to get there.

iPhone Prototype Apple Watch Prototype