Resourceful Aging

Resourceful Aging is a collaboration between TU Delft, Avans Hogeschool and Philips Design to empower people to age resourcefully. This approach steps away from the stereotype of older people as frail, passive and technologically incompetent, which underpins much healthcare technology today.

Instead, the project promotes a view of older people as very well capable of creatively dealing with the everyday challenges they encounter as they age. The project enlists as co-designers a community of ‘young’ older people (Third Age) together with their everyday objects, and it explores people’s and objects’ daily lives and mutual interactions through a holistic integration of ethnographic fieldwork and machine learning. In doing so, the project maximizes societal and economic impact: it provides a larger and more diverse group of elderly people with objects and services that are better suited to their needs and everyday practices, and avoids the waste of investment and lack of adoption of existing “fool-proof” technologies.

Resourceful Ageing: Empowering Older People to Age Resourcefully with the Internet of Things

Elisa Giaccardi, Iohanna Nicenboim (eds.)
Available online

Published in 2018

Outreach

    Talk:

    • HealthTech Event, High Tech Campus, Eindhoven (November 24th 2015)

    Other:

    • Superflux design fiction

    Funding

    • NWO Creative Industries: Research Through Design

    Collaborators

    • Hayley Hung (TU Delft / EWI)
    • Lenneke Kuijer (TU Eindhoven)
    • Louis Neven (Avans Hogeschool)
    • Jeroen Raijmakers (IDE / Philips Design)
    • Chris Speed, Ron Wakkary, Elvin Karana