Human-Centred Design for Silver Assistants

To alleviate the rapidly increasing need of the healthcare workforce to serve the enormous ageing population, leveraging intelligent and autonomous caring agents is one promising way. Working towards the design and development of dedicated personal silver assistants for older adults, we follow the human-centred design approach. Specifically, we identify a number of human factors that affect the user experience of the older adults and develop an agent named Mobile Intelligent Silver Assistant (MISA) by applying these human factors. Integrating multiple reusable services onto one platform, MISA acts as a single point of contact while simultaneously providing easy and convenient access to a wide range of personalized services to support a more independent and active lifestyle of the older adults. Furthermore, the architecture of MISA would allow new services to be incorporated easily in the future.