User Interface Design for a Social Call Centre System Aimed at Elderly

Abstract: The trend of an increasingly aging population all over the world has made the elderly care and their living arrangement become very important issues. Many elderly choose to live alone, but the accessibility to care and the safety are of concern to many of them. The caring devices for the elderly who live alone now are usually an alarm button and a machine like an interphone. This relies on the elderly to carry the alarm button with them. They can ask for care or help from the supporting organizations by pressing the button and talking through the machine.   The goal of the MonAmi project is to create a new generation of elderly home care devices by collecting many useful services that are developed with ambient intelligence technology to help elderly who live alone to feel safe and comfortable. The characteristic of elderly care system is that no matter how powerful the device is, it still need support from people E.g. to deliver food to elderly, to provide care…etc. How well the device can be supported by the other parts of the elderly care system will be the key to whether the home care device is successful or not.   The organizations behind the home care device in Sweden now are a huge system and the call center plays a very important role in this system. It is the mediator between the elderly, the caregivers and other sectors in the elderly care system. The requests from the elderly are all sent to the call centers first and then passed to the responsible people or organization.   In this thesis, field studies were conducted to reveal the interaction between the call center and other parts of the elderly care system, several new features are proposed to the future call center software to support the new generation of elderly home care devices like MonAmi project. Lastly a conceptual prototype of the future call center software is presented together with the operators from the call centers feedback on this software.