TV kiosk: new wine in old vessels to empower care dependent digital outsiders

Abstract: Driven by the problem of loneliness of elders, who are in majority digital outsiders, we iteratively developed the TV kiosk platform by deploying a user centred design process. This prototype enables a flexible, secure and decentralised solution based on Virtual Personal Network (VPAN) technology. In this paper a detailed description is made of the development steps and the in between research results to make a more inclusive solution. This kind of reporting should become a standard practice when thinking about solving these eChallenges to create more cumulative reflexive insight into the bottlenecks that hinders these kinds of prototypes to evolve into viable business cases. 1. Introduction Loneliness is an important factor disempowering people to keep an acceptable level of happiness and quality of life. Being at the advent of the exponential increase of aged people with a high care dependency, in combination with an increase of more complex family structures (e.g. divorces and remarriage) and mobility (e.g. increase in mobility for work and study), the prevalence of isolation and loneliness will become a big problem to tackle. We will not be able to cope with this problem by offering more attention of professional caregivers, since a shortage of them is expected as well due to the same age structure changes. The current success of social networks in (re-) connecting people both online and offline could be a solution for the problem of social isolation and loneliness. But the current generation of care dependent is in general not computer literate, which makes them digital outsiders for the current web applications. By choosing the TV as well-known interaction interface we hope to enable this group of digital outsiders to use digital services in an easy and safe way. The digital services are oriented at broadening the perspective to outside world by for example offering more connectivity with relatives and friends, as well as offering more topics for conversation during visits or calls. In this paper we want to report on objectives, the R&D process and lessons learnt of the TV kiosk solution. We think this should be done in a more consistent way, because it is during this R&D process insights about the bottlenecks for scalability, acceptance and commercialization of these types of solutions are gathered.