Investigating the Design of an Immersive Smart Home System for Supporting Seniors Living with Neurocognitive Disorders
Date
2022-09-16
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Abstract
The Internet of Things (IoT) technology allows for creating customized and accessible smart home systems for supporting aging in place. These systems are called Supportive Smart Home Systems (SSHS). Nonetheless, this approach comes with two main challenges. Firstly, customizing and interacting with IoT devices requires a certain level of technology literacy which many Seniors with Neurocognitive Disorders (SwNCDs) and caregivers may not have. Secondly, relying solely on smartphone applications is impractical for homecare purposes. Head-mounted Mixed Reality (MR) devices blend the physical and digital worlds to unlock natural and intuitive holographic interactions. This model makes designing tailored and seamless user experiences for SwNCDs more feasible. In addition, integrating a wearable MR device into an SSHS provides instant and effortless user interactions. However, considering MR is an emerging field of study, there is a major lack of design recommendations, especially for SwNCDs users. In this thesis, we applied a comprehensive User-Centered Design approach to introduce an immersive supportive smart home system for SwNCDs. During the investigation phase, we conducted a systematic literature review study to provide a taxonomy of the SSHS literature. Thereafter, we investigated the special requirements of SwNCDs by conducting a requirements elicitation study. Based on findings from these two studies, we introduced an initial system design. We leveraged video prototypes demonstrating all possible user-system interactions of the initial prototype to run an online Design Critique evaluation with 24 participants across Canada and the USA. After running all Design Critique sessions, a course of Thematic Analysis was conducted on the qualitative data to extract design recommendations for immersive smart home systems. Finally, we used the newly extracted design recommendations to reiterate our initial system design to produce a high-fidelity prototype and implemented it on a HoloLens2 device. We conducted usability evaluations using the Cognitive Walkthrough and Heuristic Evaluation methods. The evaluations did not identify any major usability issues in the prototype. These findings indicates that our design and evaluation process has the potential to introduce highly usable smart home system concepts.
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Keywords
Human-Computer interaction (HCI), Mixed reality, Smart home systems, Aging in place
Citation
Alabood, L. (2022). Investigating the design of an immersive smart home system for supporting Seniors living with Neurocognitive Disorders (Doctoral thesis, University of Calgary, Calgary, Canada). Retrieved from https://prism.ucalgary.ca.