Balancing sensors and seniors: introducing sensors sensitivity, human sensors and future-self goals

Abstract

Being monitored at home as an independent and fit elderly person for the sake of illnesses onset prevention poses big challenges in the design of a meaningful sensors system. In this paper we discuss how a critical understanding of seniors’ felt experience around a predictive sensors system was gained through fieldwork and experience prototyping. Starting from the fieldwork insights, several disruptive opportunity areas for the design of such monitoring systems are elicited and deployed into future scenarios, which explore the possibility of sensors sensitivity attunement; the introduction of the human sensors and the personal setting of future-self goals. The proposed concepts challenge current mainstream research on active aging, ICT solutions for the elderly population and AI as a black box disjoint from human experience, opening up to a complete new perspective of seniors as agent of their sensors monitoring system.